Yep. I’m 99% sure the end result is going to be another buggy mess that we didn’t ask for, accounting for scenarios that we didn’t ask for, giving control to users that didn’t ask for it.
Plex’s new solution seems to be accounting for the following (based on completely wrong assumptions):
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Mid stream quality change based on bandwidth: Plex can’t even correctly set the quality at the beginning, and hasn’t been able to. I don’t exactly have confidence that they’ll be able to solve this properly. Best of all, this isn’t even an issue, nor have we asked Plex to solve it. Most people have a stable connection, as in constantly slow, or constantly fast. Fairly certain, it’s only a minority that are constantly oscillating between high speed and can’t stream, must transcode to 8 mbps. My guess is that if the user has anything but a perfect stable high speed connection, it’ll transcode so that users can have a “consistent experience”.
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Users being prompted to change settings: My next guess is that if a user is prompted at all about anything relevant, I’m confident my users will just dismiss it, so they can continue watching. How do I know this? I use tautulli to kill certain streams, and rather than reading the actual message, or trying to understand what is going on, users continue to smash the play button, and continue to get their stream killed for 10 min straight, according to logs.
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What if a user has access to multiple servers? Once again, the fact that this has been repeated by Plex employees, as the reason that their current over-engineered solution is better just goes to show the disconnect.
Literally no one is asking to absolutely control user’s stream settings from all servers. The OP asked for it initially, and has since suggested a more nuanced solution. I’m confident that any users that actually ask for “Set everyone to direct play” are beyond frustrated and are suggesting the SIMPLEST solution that would take 5 min, because asking anything even slightly more complicated would take years to implement (as evidenced by this, and all the other ignored feature request threads).
Users can have all the control they want, but the DEFAULT should be in the server’s control. Let me repeat it: Default Default DEFAULT.
If they connect to MY SERVER, why aren’t they using MY preferences. It’s my CPU time, my electricity, my bandwidth, and MY media. MY money to buy content, MY time to rip it, , my $ to store it, my time to organize it. Even if I weren’t asking just for defaults, and asking for absolute control when they are connected to MY server, what is Plex’s problem???
Plex seems convinced, for some reason, that it is their server, and want to offer the "“best, most consistent” solution for the user as if the user is theirs. What they seem to be missing is that they are irrelevant. My users don’t know or care about Plex, and will stop using it as soon as I do.
Your reputation, and software is not on the line. If something doesn’t work, or quality is low, or something buffers, my users already complain to me, so please get out of the way and serve your job as a medium between server owners, and shared users and give me the settings I need. I’m not asking for absolute control over users connected to my server because that would mean another 5 years of debate, so I’m just asking for defaults.
