Maybe the only way to set the default to original is to rewrite the whole server 
It’s a rather reductive description of what @eygraber wrote and very accurate. BUT OK!!!
@eygraber you know by now, I accept that answer as truth. Everything else seems less plausible after 3 years.
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That’s not my experience, but for the sake of argument: how would the same developers who have been adding bugs and incrementally deteriorating the system … make something better from scratch?
Should we?
I have no idea why Taco Bell removed the Mexican Pizza, and I’ll never forgive them for it. They’re clearly idiots!
I think this is a paradoxical danger of any company-sponsored forum, especially one that solicits feature suggestions.
Most businesses don’t make any of that process public, and they pick and choose what they do in private, and nobody complains about it. You either use the product, or you don’t.
When there’s a forum, suddenly there’s a place to complain about the decision-making process.
And weirdly, that makes it seem like customer satisfaction goes down.
To be clear I agree with you, and wish that the default was different, and don’t understand why it isn’t. Or why clients sometimes lose the setting. I’m just trying to assume good intent.
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Something I want to make very clear is that I’m not saying that Plex has bad developers.
You can have the best team of developers in the world, but if they’re working on “20+ years of accumulated integration details and compatibility fixes and workarounds” there’s gonna be a critical point where the system is going to actively push back against you.
That might be fine for large enterprise software that never needs to change, but (aside from everything else) Plex has to keep up with the changing times (better bandwidth, new codecs, etc…).
I think the fact that the server is functional at all is a testament to the developers. Forked from software written for xbox 20 years ago, targeted towards running on a mac. That’s crazy! I don’t know if there’s ever been a full scale rewrite of the server, but with my limited (read: zero) insight into the internal workings, that’s the conclusion I’m drawing.
A new server definitely comes with danger, with never finishing it being #1. But it also gives the chance to modernize the codebase, foster innovation, and use learnings from the past 20 years to build something that we’ll still complain about, but at least it will buy another 20 years. Such is software.
I think it gives the appearance of customer satisfaction going down because of the noise it generates. If there weren’t forums, I probably would’ve abandoned Plex long ago.
However, human nature is to want more. We have a communication medium to speak with employees, the CTO himself responds to us, and that’s so enthralling that we want them to just start posting their prioritization meeting minutes in a thread here so we can all follow along.
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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
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I used to get annoyed by Plex, but I think it’s in pretty good shape now. This and multiple versions are what is missing really for me now.
I still think, and always have thought that they have their communication policy all wrong. The secrecy (which I understand around commercially sensitive developments) is what frustrates people. But if you’re actively working on something, and it’s a struggle, almost everyone would understand, so I don’t see the harm in telling people what’s going on. Even if you end up having to abandon it as it’s impossible, just tell people. Don’t leave them hanging.
But in my job I also have to deal with ‘the public’ so understand that in the internet years, it can suck your soul right out of your body, and can see why anyone would prefer to avoid it. People are the worst 
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The thing here is if someone has bad download speeds and buffering occurs they will look for a setting to reduce quality. It never happens the other way around, instead they just assume you have bad quality media.
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Or that PLEX has bad quality/platform - Plex should really pay attention to this thread/problem and make sure it’s users have a QUALITY experience.
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Maybe the only way to set the default to original is to rewrite the whole server
It won’t be that. The change can be done on the client player if need be, the reason Plex haven’t done this is more than likely there is no revenue stream to gain from it. Look at the vastly more complicated things they have been implementing instead, those are all profit features and the bug fixes and functional improvements have been almost non-existent as far as Feature Request progress is concerned.
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Getting linked into this thread at around message #500, reading up on the drama and updates from June 2021, I was somewhat hoping that when I jumped to the end there would be a fix in sight at least.
I guess I’ll just have to spend $50 on a GPU and my users will have ■■■■ quality.
Not looking for perfect. Apparently there are some very simple Cloudflare and Nginx scripts which seems to give us somewhat the control we’re looking for, but having admins implement that is not simple. Having the literal same features on the servers on the other hand would be fairly simple.
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Perfect truly is the enemy of good.
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Jesus christ I have to revisit this for the 3rd time in my life, and I find it quite goddamn sad that this is so hard.
@elan My proposition; I go to your building, You give me access to a PC and I will change this godawful configuration setup within 30 minutes. I don’t need payment, I don’t need a thank you, I just want someone to do this goddamn job and do it now.
I would feel awful if one of my most requested features is something as simple as a goddamn config toggle, and we still fail to produce any results because “its hard”
What the hell man? I could get my 10 year old sister to make this change free of charge. This is just stupidity to the limit.
SOLUTION: Set to Origional quality, people have braincells, they can change the goddamn setting within the video when it ■■■■■ up. With your setting it ■■■■■ up 9 out of 10 times. It pisses me off so much that I’m going to cancel my subscription renewal and move over to whatever works.
Thank you for nothing, thank you for endless explanations to friends, endless cries about buffering and terrible quality. Thanks a lot.
Plex is the first service I literally ever cancelled because of bullshit development problems. It’s really sad I am lost for words.
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Once again, someone bought a new TV and I have to talk them through changing the default. Why the ■■■■ are we still on 2 mbit by default in 2022?
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@elan is this thing still on the roadmap or was work on this abandoned?
Any updates you can share?
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Yes @elan, any update would be more than welcome
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Because I guess wherever Plex is from their internet has to be carried by harddrive and transported by donkey. 2mbps comes down to 4 seconds per MB… Which means we’ll have used 15 MB per minute. It’s not a lot, its quite little.
Its hilarious my power usage doubles because Plex thinks transcoding my 3.2 Mbps 1080p movie to 2 mbps 720p is worth it. We pay like 2 euros per kilowatthour nowadays? My CPU is a poor old 12 core Xeon that just loves electricity.
I feel like if we all tag @elan here at some point he will have to see it, do something perhaps?
I don’t hate nor dislike you Elan/Plex, but at some point someone will have to get on your nerves before you give a damn, right?
I really still haven’t seen any one from any of your more technical functions come look at this, perhaps one of them can come up with something better than “this config switch is hard”
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The scripts involve basically man-in-the-middle attacks on yourself/client streams so you can hijack it and change the quality…
It’s hilarious we have to go this far just because there isn’t a “solution which universally works”
Except… Of course… Switching that one config entry from one lower to one higher… 
Would you by chance be willing to share those scripts? I unfortunately use apache but I’m sure I can work something out through apache/cloudflare
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I am not going to say it takes too long but from the time it was raised till now people have finished their Bachelors degrees and worked on harder problems during their bachelor projects…
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Plex simply does not understand their end user. Anyone who spends any time thinking about how a user interacts with a media streaming platform knows this is true. Users want the highest quality they can get. The platform should assume the best-case scenario (that the bandwidth supports it), and they can rest easy knowing that if the user doesn’t have the connection for it, then they’re more than capable of turning a quality slider down and probably do it every time they watch a YouTube video.
Then again, I feel like we’re making the mistake of assuming that server owners (not to mention server users or their experience) are on Plex’s mind whatsoever. I think the reality is Plex doesn’t spend any time thinking about how a user interacts with the personal media portion of this platform. Has anyone looked at the homepage recently? Head over to https://www.plex.tv/, check it out.
If you didn’t have knowledge of what Plex was, could you even tell that this software lets you use your own hardware to stream personal media to your friends and family? It’s an afterthought now, and so is the development of any features that serve to improve that experience.
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Haven’t gotten that far yet, I’ve just set up Plex in Nginx Proxy Manager as I already had that running, hoping to be able to use that. First I’m trying @sixxnet’s config above, but it requires some changes for it to work in NPM.
