@elan there’s been a lot of discussion in this thread regarding the pros and cons, and to me it all boils down to the question of who Plex is optimizing for, the server owners, or the server users.
My viewpoint is that the server owners are the most invested both in terms of time and money; they manage the servers, collect the media, and host it on their machines. They also usually have PlexPass.
I believe giving them the choice to manage their resources as best as they can is the way to go. They know their users, and can make the call about what default would be best for them. Perhaps my initial choice of title for this thread was a mistake. If you feel not defaulting to max is the way to go, at least allow server owners to change that.
Would love to hear your opinion on this, as well as any facts that would prevent this feature from being implemented that may have eluded this thread.
Cause more problems? Having new users transcode everything to 720p is causing problems. We just want the option to change it on an admin level…at least that’s what I’d like to see.
I would love a feature to default all clients to maximum quality or automatic quality based on bandwidth. It feels like basic feature for a person owning a server to have. It is ridiculous having to tell everyone using my server to set maximum quality ( I know their speed is enough for it). I do not want them to use up my poor cpu and make them watch poor video quality when they do not need to. Where I live people usually have very good internet speeds. Please add this feature, Plex.
Why not let the Server owner decide. They know their Users better than Plex does. Why force a default setting on us that is so wrong for so many. It’s 2020 after all, 56k modems have not been a thing for a long time now.
Here you can not even buy an Internetconnection that is not capable of streaming 1080p. I had to write up a pdf with screenshots to tell my users to do this to get the best quality.
Its ridiculous that I have to do it.
If a user is on a limited dataplan, that user is aware, and won’t i.e. sit and stream youtube all day long in full quality, but it is, as it should, up to that user to limit the stream quality if streaming is still done.
Plex should do the same.
It makes no sense to limit quality for the 99% of users that are NOT on a limited plan, in fact it just gives users crappy quality/experience and more load (transcoding) on server.
It makes no sense to limit quality to a spesific preset in case of limited dataplan, this is up to the user, how limited is the plan? What kind of device is it? Small tiny screen and very limited plan the plex default may be to much. The default may kill the users data plan regardless. You can’t know, so don’t try to.
Make it visible at the start of the stream what quality is selected, with a HD or 4k badge or whatever appropriate, like youtube does, see this image for suggestion: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Bhjg3B5JeWvsNsZa6
For the love of all that is holy in the world, make the default in all clients be auto quality, which means if there is bandwidth available, play original, if not automatically step down for best user experience, like everyone is used to youtube doing for years.
Youtube does bw check on the fly continiously during playback, if the bandwidth is not there, the playback buffer will shrink, there are algoritms in place to both increase and decrease quality dynamically as needed. Now we all know plex has this “Auto” setting as well, the problem is that is is not enabled by default in the clients. Instead a year 2008 quality setting of 720p 4MBit is default giving both the client users a bad quality playback, as well as server admins a bad time with high loads for unneeded transcoding by unaware users. Please fix this, and add h265 encoding while you’re at it. Thank you.
That’s not quite right; enabling it varies the quality of the transcode automatically, but it doesn’t switch automatically between transcoding and remuxing, which is one reason why we don’t enable it by default now.
Still doesn’t address the issue that there still are some clients that require a transcode for a special file. I’d rather have this feature disable transcoding unless client requires it. Or push the default remote streaming to maximum or default to servers choice and let users change it later if they need to, most bandwidth limited users are aware of this and would apply their own measurements if necessary.
God please add this in, it’s nothing more than a freaking setting and a check on the client end, a monkey could add this in…
My girlfriend shares her (‘family managed’) account with her sister, however the settings keep overlapping one another and now every time I start a new movie or series it ■■■■■ up completely and starts streaming in 720p.
Max quality at all times should be the default, giving people the ability to drop down if needed, or even automatically through the existing function. Not this 720p 4mbps crap. Especially since it cuts down my need to transcode EVERY USER because their default is set to ■■■■ quality and half are too stupid to actually change it, leaving me with more shlte than I’d like.
Also, 90% of the people who need transcoding on a regular basis could be eliminated if the plex app for apple TV was improved.
I have had users test Infuse 6, and it NEVER needs transcoding, it can direct play pretty much any codec you throw at it.
It’s ironic that you need a 3rd party plex player to properly play plex server content. Apparently plex apple tv app uses the native Apple tv player, which suports VERY few codecs, while Infuse 6 has their own embedded player with vast codec support. Something to learn there plex team, but I guess that’s a topic for another discussion, sort of…
