That’s perfectly fine. No one should be advocating for not letting them lower the bitrate. Just that the default should be max, or at least configurable on the server.
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So was the part about active work on the front a lie or did you just not understand what you were talking about?
This kind of crass replies is probably why it’s so hard to get Plex to give time frames on development most of the time.
But when that is being said I would like to know what the status is. The radio silence is kind of deafening.
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Has anyone gotten an explanation for why the FireTV default is 2mb and Roku is 4mb? Can anyone even imagine a possible reason?
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The dice willed it.
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LOL
I always wondered if they think there’s a demographic of people still on DSL or 3g hotspots who are more likely to buy Firesticks than Roku. That’s all I could come up with.
And BS’ing us is why they get crass replies.
It’s a catch 22. 
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So this is why I thought I was going insane when making my streamkill rules for Tautulli/jbops
Adding comment #1089 requesting to default all clients to Max Remote Quality. Voted for this in Sept 2019 and it’s had one of my votes since.
I have implemented the workaround solution above, which helps a ton. After years of checking this request, it was a nice surprise from fellow users (much appreciated). But I have still ended up spending several thousands of dollars so far on more powerful hardware to support transcoding nearly all of my 4K and 1080p media down to 720p on gigabit connections with 4K hardware. My friends and family have begun using Plex’s new Discovery feature to find things to watch, and if the movie/show they want is available on another service they go there first now because “Plex never looks/sounds as good”. Well, that’s cause Plex reset back to 720p yet again and I haven’t been there to fix your settings for you. The setting being 3+ levels deep in the menu is also ridiculous when they force you to access it so often, but I guess if they can’t change the value of the setting after several years, moving the option in the menu could probably take centuries. By then we’ll have all our media stored directly in our brains with optical resolution beyond anything we could ever imagined, and Plex will probably still limit us to 720p lol. Still love my Plex server, but damn. Of all the simple things that could solve SO many issues. Even changing it to 8Mb 1080p would probably thrill 90% of us…or more…
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Even making it the same default across platforms might turn the Hulk back into Bruce Banner.
What if we try reverse psychology?
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@elan have you considered something like a next gen server rewrite?
Because of the lack of transparency, we have no idea what the holdup is when it comes to implementing features like this one, or AV1 support.
If the issue is working it into a legacy codebase, or having to support older clients, I think a next gen server could really help. You can throw out any legacy issues that are causing trouble, and drop support for any clients that are holding back progress.
Plus you know you’d have an eager community ready to help test it 
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Please never do this! Second-system syndrome is the devil.
There’s no such thing as a “legacy” codebase. There’s only existing, functional software.
Plex is 20+ years of accumulated integration details and compatibility fixes and workarounds. That isn’t cruft, it’s hard-earned wisdom.
Continued incremental improvement, please!
Absolutely, 100% true.
That’s always the danger, but if done right it can work. I’ve done it a few times successfully.
This is true, and maybe makes it harder to get right for Plex, but…
My experience has been continued incremental deterioration. There have been bugs or missing features that haven’t been addressed in years.
Anything that does work slowly accumulates bugs that are rarely if ever addressed, and not in a timely manner.
Multiple “fluff” features that no one asked for have been released and quietly killed. Then there’s the ever present push to monetize outside of Plex Pass.
We have no visibility into why this is happening. Maybe it’s a business decision, but Elan has hinted that it’s not (although I can understand why he wouldn’t want to tell the truth if that was the case).
The most likely remaining reason is that the codebase is in such a precarious position that these improvements and fixes can’t be made with bringing the whole thing down.
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Or, as has been suggested multiple times, their goal is to provide a thoughtful implementation which works across a wide range of clients. But then again, I tend to assume the best in people and what motivates them.
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I think that one went out the door a year and a half ago.
I’m not so sure that’s the case. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why you might be frustrated. It was a mistake for Elan to mention a timeframe, even if it was intended as humor at the time.
But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a feature request which requires touching every client as well as the server. All the reasons why this isn’t as simple as “implement a toggle on the server and call it good” have been discussed above; I’ll not repeat them here. We’re not just discussing a single codebase. They are necessarily different for each of the various client types: Web, Android, iOS, Roku, tvOS, various TV platforms which don’t simply load the web client, etc…
I also understand that this seems like a huge problem to some. But realistically, there have been only 222 unique commenters in this thread and 1008 votes. That vote total may seem large in the context of other feature suggestions, but so is the scale of the request. It’s like the request for support for multiple editions of a movie (which is also in the process of being implemented).
We’ve got a leg up on many feature requests which go without ever receiving a comment from Plex staff. This one has garnered a commitment for implementation. So while I understand the impatience after having waited so long, I don’t agree with attacking their motivations or the quality their work.
All of these snarky remarks serve very little purpose at this point. Unless you think they will further motivate Plex to implement a feature they’re already working on.
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I love how we got from ‘set the default to original’ to ‘rewrite the whole server’
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This thread has been open for 3 years. I made it as a continuation of another thread that got locked which was around for some time before that. So we’re talking 5-6 years of waiting for this solution to come out.
I’ve been a senior engineer / team lead for 10 years now at a variety of startups where very small teams have done the impossible. I’ve also worked at/with much larger companies that have done the same, doing things much more complex than this.
As the years tick by, Plex is running out of excuses.
I think that’s a red herring. A lot of server users probably never realize that they’re affected by this. Most non server users probably never realize they’re affected by this or it wouldn’t be an issue.
That doesn’t make it any less of an issue.
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That’s a rather reductive description of what I wrote, and not at all accurate. But, OK.
