If the user has poor internet, they can change the setting down themselves to adjust for bandwidth usage as they see fit. This is for the default implementation for the majority of people who have decent internet now. We’re not on dial-up anymore.
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Almost 2 years since it was described as low-hanging fruit, and still nothing has changed.
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and to make it worse, they don’t even give a straight answer like, “The analytics show that most users still have low bandwidth connections”, or “investors don’t want us Wasting time on this”.
The best answer they can come up with is that “it’s not as simple as changing de default setting”.
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I can’t understand why they can’t (at the very least) have remote quality be per account rather than per client.
Well, you may want to have a different setting for mobile connections, like phones vs your cable/fiber at home, so it can not be an account wide setting.
The default should be original quality, at least on stationary clients, its 2022, this whole thread, this whole discussions is so f… bonkers, this should have been fixed within 5 minutes.
So frustrating.
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How is this still an issue?? I first commented on this in 2020, 2 years ago!
Also, another cause of frustration for me has been the inconsistency of video quality settings between devices. Why are there two options depending on the client? Original and Maximum? It’s so frustrating already having to explain to users over and over to adjust their settings. But having to figure out which option to tell them just makes it even more complicated and annoying…
Now I see there’s a sort of hack that’ll force the resolution to be what you want. How can it be that the community has come up with a solution, but not the actual devs? Maybe the dev’s could implement the community fix as a simple checkbox for now until their final solution is completed.
@elan Would that be possible?
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Haha, don’t hold your breath.
They still have auto adjust quality listed as being in beta, and this option has been labeled that way for at least 4 years.
Plex is simply the best worst solution to our media library propagation and distribution problems. The other competitors are nowhere near as user friendly in setup and UI even if they offer more server sided control.
And even plex really is not very user friendly with it’s process of setting up a new user to gain access to your server. You have to instruct them to go to friends and make sure to click the check mark, to accept the friend request, then tell them to unpin (read as: nuke away) plex’s forced fed unwanted movie/tv free BS. and then manually pin the new server they joined, so they can actually see the content. When plex went and added their own “free and completely unwanted” movies/tv stuff being displayed by default, it became even more troublesome to onboard new plex users that are using a friend’s plex server for the first time/
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Agreed, the onboarding and default user interface is catastrophic for the ‘personal media’ use case, but you forget that this is not Plex’s core competency anymore. Plex is a streaming platform first now, not only personal media manager anymore.
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Why? Because they won’t change a default setting for you?
Buying a Plex Pass doesn’t entitle you to jack besides the features it unlocks. Which BTW are all still unlocked. The Paid features haven’t changed and anything “streaming” related is FREE.
Go ahead and force your clients to higher deafults using my nginx script up a few posts.
No, I honestly could have gotten by without the Plex pass I paid for 3 reasons. 1) not needed but every once in a blue moon I may use my cell phone to watch something 2) to better manage users( no longer really needed because people don’t watch anymore due to poor quality or buffering from the setting) and I no longer offer to share because of the hassles of this and the onboarding process just discussed above. 3) because I like Plex and wanted to support them to continue to better the product. But they have almost abandoned the product in favor of others.
Your solution isn’t bad but I’m not that familiar in how to implement it and haven’t had much time to learn. But if it’s so easy for you and others to do it, they could have. Also with your solution I have a lot of 4k hdr content what happens when users need that converted?
Edit… am I also being overly dramatic, sure!
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So much time has gone by since my last reply. I’m at a complete loss why this is so hard to get fixed. I totally get that when you’re a developer other people saying “oh durr this would be super easy to do!” is crazy annoying when they have literally no knowledge into your specific codebase, but I’ve still got to say – unless Plex is written in hieroglyphics on an Apple II, this is not a hard change to make. Like, I cannot stress enough how easy it is to change a default setting. They don’t even need to worry about changing the setting for existing users, simply adjusting the default so it won’t flip back in the future is enough.
At this point the only thing I can imagine is that there is some reason beyond all conceivable imagination why they are actively against doing this. It makes no sense, but what else could there be? The whole “oh we’re super busy and have a lot going on and blah blah blah” crap only works for so long. Nobody at Plex can come here and say that for the past THREE YEARS a developer hasn’t had the time to quickly change a default selection, and if they do I’d call them a liar.
There is a difference between prioritization causing you to genuinely not have the time to do something, and de-prioritization making you not give a crap about doing it. This isn’t still an issue because there’s just too much other important stuff going on, this is an issue because the team refuses to dedicate 10 minutes of time to fix something for the community if it does not directly correlate with profit.
Anybody coming here saying otherwise, unless you give me a legitimate technical rationale for why this has been impossible for the team to accomplish over the span of three years, please keep the platitudes to yourself. Frankly, at this point I would rather just have a team member say, “yeah, it’s just not important to us, we’re okay with it being a pain for you guys” instead of another “oh gee golly I’m just as upset as you” reply. At least then I could respect them for being honest. The last input was that this was being “prototyped” over a full year ago. I’ve written and prototyped software, and I just… as I said before, I know that armchair developers chiming in when there’s so much they aren’t aware of is annoying, but three years with a year of prototyping? For this? Come on, man.
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PLEASE MAKE THIS CHANGE PLEX! I will buy a Lifetime Plex Pass Day 1 after this change is made. This is beyond frustrating.
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There’s already a separate setting for streaming through cellular (at least on ios I’m not sure about Android) so I still stand that it should be account wide setting.
You are absolutely correct.
I retract my previous statement and propose the opposite.
Use my nginx script above to force them to max.
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No one should need to install nginx and dabble with scripts because they don’t want to give us a simple default setting change. Emby and jellyfin did it tears ago and it works fine.
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I have not looked at the nginx stuff, I am sure its fine, but I actually do want ppl to be able to transcode if they want or need to for whatever reason, just not needlessly by default.
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Me too. The script can be modified to only work if the bitrate is the default 720p 2mbit and let everything else through. Just some small modifications is all that’s needed. Then if the client app is set to default it will max it out instead but if they need to transcode then so be it as long as it’s not 720p 2mbit.
Could also set other triggers based on header content such as username or device.
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Thanks for explaining, sounds good.
