@elan Mr. CTO I would like to inform you that users of streaming platforms expect the highest quality data rate right from the start. I’m sure if people don’t have the proper connection then turning the bitrate down is feasable. 9/10 people don’t need to do this but perhaps on mobile it would make sense. Why would they turn it up when most users are morons and just default their thinking to “oh well, Plex has ■■■■ media quality. I’m going back to Netflix.” You don’t see people needing to turn up Netflix. If anything they turn it down. If I was dumb too I would just get rid of Netflix alltogether if it defaulted to trash quality. It’s sad to even need to release a MITM hack for this ridiculous problem.
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I think it’s safe to assume the majority of Plex’s user acquisition rate are server owner’s inviting others to the platform. Most of their revenue being from Plex Pass subscribers, they seek to create other revenue streams with this user base to legitimize and stabilize the business for the long term, so they attempt to retain and monetize this audience in as many ways possible, which results in them throwing features at the wall to see what sticks: DVR, live TV, News, VR, Podcasts, Web Shows, TIDAL, Plexamp, ad-supported video on demand, Watch Together, Arcade, etc. They’d like to keep their audience of course and they are hard at work to create sticky features to retain users and open up additional revenue stream possibilities.
They would do well to ensure their users have a consistently high quality experience and that server owners are happy since it is they that are bringing users to the platform in droves. Toss us a bone, ensure the quality is as good as it can be for as many users as possible, right out of the gate - no custom server-owner-to-user-onboarding pdfs or late night chats explaining where the option is, no tweaking config for every new device and occasionally again on the same device, no repetitive monitoring and nagging for quality adjustments to ensure there is a high quality experience for everyone, no MITM stream hacks, etc. Help reduce the carbon footprint Plex’s default quality option has thrusted upon the world - I shudder to think of the combined total waste. Hell, with more CPU availability, we may even bring more users to you!
We want Plex to succeed, please hear us and prioritize this. 
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Wonder how fast it would have been fixed if the increased CPU costs came out of their budget instead of ours. Two hours?
At work I rewrote some code so that we went from 48 vCPU to 4 for a service. Pretty great feeling. This could be you Plex.
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How many good devs here could team up together to bring this feature ?
This could be interesting to open a Github page where every developpers here could join and work together to break that Plex limitation.
What do you think, @eygraber, @frans2, @sixxnet, @DeBoet, @tyler7551, and many others here ?
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I don’t think we can do anything because Plex is closed source.
I also think that Plex is very lucky, and making a terrible business decision banking on the fact that there’s currently no competent competition.
As soon as there’s a decent alternative, there’ll be a mass exodus of server admins. Then we’ll find out if users actually care about Plex’s latest and greatest “features”.
I’d love to be the one to make that decent alternative, and I’ve given it a lot of thought the past few weeks. Anything I do would be a side project and would move pretty slowly.
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I am already running dual server over here to ease in my users in. I do not have much hope for Plex left tbh, but I’d LOVE to be wrong.
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Might as well incorporate a cryptocurrency miner into the transcoder. Get some real use out of it.
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I’ve had similar thoughts, Jellyfin is probably the best option but the client support and UI is particularly lacking.
Unfortunately, to build from scratch even the basic feature set of Plex/Emby/Jellyfin would be months and months, maybe years of work. The team at Jellyfin is growing, though, so I’m hopeful.
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Now that everyone has to log out EVERY SINGLE DEVICE, get ready to have 4mps and 2mps transcodes on every device. Get your SMS’s ready!
There is ZERO reason to log out every single device. DO NOT DO THIS. I don’t care what the e-mail says. Unless you see people streaming that shouldn’t be there isn’t cause for this and even if you do see someone you can just log out their device specifically.
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I can’t find it now but someone mentioned the device keys could be compromised. So possibly someone could spoof your connected devices if that were the case? This is just a paraphrase of someone else making assumptions based on very little info though.
A concern might be auth tokens with server admin-level access. In that case the impact would be significant.
I don’t have any sense of how likely that is. I assume that if Plex believed it had occurred they would invalidate all tokens.
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You know what I think… since everybody is going to log out all their damn devices they will have to set the streaming quality again on all their apps. It’s one thing for this data breach to happen. It’s another thing to flat out ignore a popular request for years.
Set the default to maximum. Not only is this lame, now it’s extra lame. We changed our passwords and nuked all the devices.
Now you do this for us Plex.
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“Yes, squid pro row” Austin Powers
Just to correct myself here, Roku and Android TV clients have retained the streaming bitrate settings for me so far. I am sure this wasn’t always the case, every single Roku even got reset to the default by a client update from Plex at one time. This doesn’t detract from this thread but I made a bad assumption that logging out a client would reset this.
I’m going to go through with it, expletives.
I actually did have a bunch of devices clear setting because of getting logged out from the stupid password resets. All my users (friends and family I share my server with) got their own emails from Plex and followed the instructions, and when a bunch of them relinked to my server my transcodes quadrupled.
I have a lot of older family members using my server. Has anyone tried to explain to their grandmother how to use WiFi? Now try getting them to change quality settings on a streaming app. I’d rather get a root canal….or in this case I just spent $800 on a more powerful GPU for one of my servers yet again, because of this one damn setting that hasn’t even had its value changed in years (Plex’s fault) and a data breach requiring resets (ALSO Plex’s fault).
Does anyone have any contact info for a Plex admin? I’m gonna give my 89 year old aunt their number and she can start calling them every time we have quality issues with Plex. Maybe that will give someone a hint at how annoying this is for us.
Thanks Plex for another lovely weekend of needless troubleshooting!!
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Adding my support to this…
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you cropped a lot so they might be 720p original quality, who knows.
Do you really think that’s the case?
I don’t think any of us needs proof that the setting causes issues.
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