Default All Clients to Max Internet Streaming

Feature Suggestions
707

The weirder place that’s more applicable to this issue, is that the users are users both of Plex, and the server admins.

All of the users on my server only use Plex because of my server. They don’t use live tv, or the free Plex channels/movies. They watch media that I host and stream from my hardware.

The friction here is because Plex is saying they want the best experience for their users, while us admins are saying that we know our users better than Plex, and we know how to provide the best experience to our users, and at the end of the day, it’s our users using our hardware, and we should have a say about how that is managed.

3 Likes
708

I would be willing to bet a fairly large sum of money that the vast majority of users on Plex are not users under the umbrella of server admins. The vast majority are either people who privately host their server strictly to their own household and never touch anyone beyond their home, or people who have begun to start showing up to use the free streaming that Plex provides. Not to mention a whole mess of people who use it for photos or music and never host video where none of this particular forum topic even matters. I, like you, host a server that is accessible to a number a users that only watch the content that I host, but a good number of my users also do occasionally watch some of the free content that Plex provides. I caught myself watching Hellraiser on one of the free live channels the other day. A few of my users where even using Plex prior to me allowing them access to my server for the free content Plex provides. Whether server admins like it or not, they are the minority in all of this, and being abrasive and s***ty to the Plex team is not going to get them any further. Plex has for many years served its server admins admirably, but the times are changing and Plex is growing. With that change and growth is certainly going to come a change in the urgency that Plex can handle all of the very specific requests that they get. They have said numerous times on this post that they are working on it. We just need to be patient understand that great things are coming and give them a poke every once in while to remind them that we are still here. I am certain Plex hasn’t forgotten who brought them here, but now we need to give them a little of our faith so they can grow this into what we all know it can be. The single greatest streaming platform out there.

3 Likes
709

They had it, they squandered it. I feel it started when they decided to be all shi^H^H^H… great with their privacy policy, if you can remember that controversy. It all went downhill from there. Adchoices are still not manageable in the app and link out to some unusable website. It’s not even a hyperlink, you have to c/p the “link”. And then visit multiple websites you have to find yourself and go through they hoops. Great users experience for a service I host myself and where I don’t need ads nor this party shady companies.
Those are clearly engineered dark patterns, let’s not kid ourselves. Same as putting their ad supported movies in the same interface where we host our private stuff. As an opt out instead of opt in.
I would bet much that the vast majority of users do not know the difference between a Plex server, the company and the private content. My users call the server just Plex, do not know about yours.

There is no faith left, the abysmal communication from Plex does not help to rebuild trust either.

I get that you are trying to be positive and put a positive spin on that mess but I do not think that you can polish that particular turd.

It has been 2 whole years.

710

Just buying a good CPU and a P2000 to handle transcoding is much less stress than waiting on this to actually be implemented.

Sucks for the friends and family who get crappy quality streams because if you don’t keep reminding them that it changed back to crap 2Mbps they never know, but Plex doesn’t care and if they don’t notice (or remember to check/change after the 837th time you told them) then it’s on them. Quit holding your breath for Plex. They are too busy adding stupid free stuff and video games.

711

Well I guess the good news is, other platforms exist if Plex has done you that wrong. Emby, JF, and Kodi are all out there. I personally think the privacy thing was blown way out of proportion by a bunch of paranoid people who didn’t understand the complexity of what they were suggesting was going to happen, but I can understand people having their own view of that situation, and the great thing is Plex responded quickly and dealt with it. I still think Plex is a great company who does care about its users in a way I haven’t really ever seen. We are talking about a multimillion dollar company who probably has millions of users and a bunch of investors to keep happy. Yet people like the co-founder still take their time to come and talk directly to users in the forums. My users do know the difference between ad supported Plex content and my private content but that is because I take the time to explain it to them. I was a collegiate instructor for about 5 years which definitely helps when trying to explain Plex to new users. Again like I said before, we server admins are the minority in all this and we can either accept that and be happy that Plex still goes out of their way to satisfy us or we can leave and attempt to find another solution, which you’ll probably never find. The reality is though chastising and bashing the Plex team isn’t going to get us anywhere and frankly makes server owners look like a bunch of entitled brats. The solution to the problem that is proposed in this post is not as easy as just flipping a switch and being done with it. This is a big problem that needs a more nuanced and complete solution then “just default them to max”. My hope is that they can come up with some sort of solution that forces the client and server to communicate about what kind of bandwidth and resources are available to both. Like if I only have one user who wants to stream a massive 4K file then the server gives it to them in direct play, but if I have 10 people on and they all are trying to watch a giant 4K file it starts to transcode some of those files because the server says it doesn’t have enough bandwidth to do that. On the other side I would like my users to communicate the devices capability and bandwidth so the server can make a decision whether or not to transcode their file. But a solution like that is way more complicated then just flipping a couple switches.

1 Like
712

(Google translator)…

Bandwidth limit exceeded when transcoding from h.265 to h.264

I adjust my videos to 1080p x265 to the maximum possible bitrate without exceeding 4mb bitrate so that most of the shares do not have to be transcoded and get a more than decent video quality.

The problem is when a client is not compatible with h265 and transcodes it, automatically exceeding that 4mb bandwidth, requiring about 20mb to be transcoded to h264. When playing a video and manually setting it to a 4mb limit within the video playback, I see that it does respect that limit. My relatives with whom I share my collection, and they have this problem, they are usually older people who do not know how to manually set the limit on each reproduction or simply do not remember, with which I receive comments that such video suffered constant playback stoppages.

My solution, which I don’t want as it would affect my other clients or myself, would be to put my videos at 720p and h264.

Any other solution that escapes me?

I do not know if I have explained myself very well :sweat_smile: and with the google translator :sweat_smile:

This is the correct post to talk about it? if not some other thread?

713

Let’s kick this bad boy back up.

Any news? Hope we get something be the end of the year at least.

3 Likes
714

:frowning: = my face every time I see a user needlessly transcoding.

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715

This drives me crazy every times. They forget all the time, especially parents. I don’t have the force anymore to ask them to change their settings again and again and again.

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716

Unfortunately, no status updates have been coming in for months. Although it was said at the time that it had been in development for some time and was being tested externally. I really wonder what is being programmed there. This must really be a world sensation, otherwise it could never last so long.

Would you at least make a fix and set the standard to original, that would probably 80-90% of all server admins massively relieve, but it has no interest, you want to program the perfect new feature, although here so many have doubted whether that is possible at all, but instead of the whole to tighten you make with the nothing say everything much worse.

717

I personally still havent figured out how one would handle other clients (suddenly) using bandwidth at the client site.

Now the responsibility is on the user in chosing the avalible bandwidth that the Plex client can use - That will change when this solution gets implemented.

718

If…

719

After reading most of this thread, I have a few take away thoughts…

Firstly, some of you are mad salty / petty while I low-key live for it you need to cut them a little bit of a break. I genuinely believe they’re trying hard to improve Plex across the board, even if its not at the pace we want. It’s evident by the fact they’re waaaay more active on the forums now and vocal on which features are being considered (or not). Granted, they might not be as quick at implementing features as the community would like, but that’s just development in general. While I’m a huge fan of open development (roadmap pls), I honestly don’t even encourage Plex to have one as they’ll just get ridiculed for delays. (I digress)

Secondly, I’m totally in the minority here but I’m all for a revamped “Adjust Automatically” feature that’s enabled by default. The current implementation of this is frustrating at best and I can’t wait to see the back of it and I hope that by design you can disable direct play in favour of direct stream. UX wise, my users don’t need to play around with their quality settings, ever. It should be automatic for them and the Plex logic should be smart enough to achieve this. However, I do somewhat agree that some more server side tweaking is desperately needed moving forward.

Third, what we have currently in terms of tweaking is, well, abysmal… BUT, I’m not disappointed with how the system works. I’m more than okay with setting a global “max bitrate”, what I’m not okay with is how it’s been implemented. If I set the max to “4 Mbps (720p)”, please tell me why 1080p (x265) files with less bandwidth are being transcoded to a file with less quality and double the bitrate, that logic is terrible and this system needs minor adjustment to focus solely on the bitrate and exclude the resolution from the filter, or even just a checkbox next to this to “Only consider bitrate”. This small adjustment shouldn’t take a lot of resources to implement, I would guess maybe a few lines of code that would immediately help stop some of the unnecessary transcoding, I just hope you consider it.

Finally, in my opinion there’s only one more thing that we (so desperately) need. The ability to apply this “max bitrate” (or disable transcoding) from the “Restrictions” section of user. It would essential become an override to what would then become the “global default”. Having the ability to apply this on a per-user basis creates more than enough freedom and control. For example, my grandparents that don’t have a large TV, don’t need to stream at Ultra HD. Franky, they probably won’t notice the difference between SD or HD and manually tuning them to SD would free up a lot of my (limited) bandwidth. But, on the flip side if I’m away from home or my friend is watching a movie in his home theater, I don’t want to be limited to 720p, I want full direct stream and my friend doesn’t want 720p either, he wants Ultra HD. Even this feature alone, I would assume wouldn’t take too much to implement as its essentially leveraging what you’ve already implemented, just replacing the resolution filter with a userID.

6 Likes
720

waayyyyyy TL;DR

1 Like
721

You didn’t have to read it :man_shrugging:

It was mostly aimed at the devs hahaha

722

Excellent write up friend. I agree basically across the board. The only thing I’d like to add is I would really like to see Plex implement some way for the server to report its available bandwidth so that intelligent bitrate limitations could be made on the fly by the server. Like in my case I only have 40Mbps up and 90% of the time that’s fine because I only have maybe 3-4 of my 10 or so users watching at a time. But every once in a while 5 or 6 people will start watching and that can totally crush my upload. In that case I would love if Plex could intelligently on the fly transcode some of those based on when they accessed the files and based on overall bitrate.

1 Like
723

Any updates on a beta test? Few of my users needed to edit their settings again due to update reverting back the settings.

724

@juansit0

This will happen to you more often. Since there are absolutely no more feedbacks here, I assume there are problems. Not without reason, elan has also no longer answered and only said he had miscalculated with the time horizon.

What makes me extremely suspicious is that it was said that the development of the feature had been given externally. Therefore I find it strange that there is no time horizon. If you have something done externally, you have a project time or a final date agreed. But you probably don’t want to overestimate yourself again like you did with the statement that it won’t take a year until we have a solution.

I just don’t understand why you don’t set it to original for all apps until the solution with the new feature. It would only be fair if all those with poor connections have to do some work. After all, we with good connections have to change everything again every few months because it was reset by updates.

725

I have actually experienced the opposit. It’s been a long time since any of my users had their settings revert to default and to be honest that has actually kinda solve this issue for me - As long as the apps remember the setting I don’t care (Too much) if I have to talk users through “first time setup” - So good job Plex!

Were was this said? Link?

726

It says here that it was given externally for testing. Why there was no update since then I don’t know. It’s been months.