Back for my bi-weekly scream for attention for this, please do keep voting and responding to this so it remains a thing we really wish to have.
Perhaps nowadays we can call upon this feature sinply for the sake of power consumption? All that transcoding gonna make me broke!
I agree, A lot of unnecessary power could be saved.
It’s just silly at this point.
I appreaciate all the updates. and enjoy lot each one.
But most of us need this more than versions of movies or other advanced things.
I will continue supporting and appreciating all work from Plex team. but If is not that hard, please set original/max quality as default settings.
Thanks
I still can’t figure out how changing a setting or a configuration can be harder than 10 seconds of work for them, but here we are 3 years 1 month in haha
One thing though I got going with Plex now… Y’all make a space heater completely unneeded, I have since moved my server downstairs and every time some poor sod tries to play basically anything without having changed the settings my living room heats up! No big deal though, it’s only a small difference between using 80-90 watts idle or 300+ watts of transcoding useless crap that doesn’t have to be transcoded. Shall I do the math on the approximate energy bill here or will you?
So thanks guys, shitey company workflow ethics make for shitey solutions.
Send them an invoice for a partial payment on the electric bill for ignoring us for so long.
I have 570Mbit upload through Spectrum FTTH IN THE WOODS IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. If I didn’t train my peeps thoroughly I would be using MY OWN NGINX SCRIPT. Thankfully I don’t have to use it.
If this thread was a child, it would go to kindergarten now.
Imagine not being able to play a 2mbps video… that’s 250 KB/s…
A goddamn quarter of a MegaByte per second.
Better yet… there should be a default “Auto” setting that will play files at 20Mbps 4K quality by default unless the server admin chooses a default to override any clients default “Auto” setting. This would allow a typical Plex client on mediocre WiFi to still work while allowing Server Admins the flexibility of limiting transcoding if that’s important to them.
Not meaning to contribute to the “Let’s all go use Jellyfin instead!” bandwagon, however I’ve been playing about with JF the past week and have to say I’m impressed with how well they handle this. From what I can tell the client does a quick speed test to the server to get an idea of the available bandwidth, seems simple but effective.
All default settings, handful of different clients on different speed fixed line connections and 4G / 5G connections, all managed to figure out what bitrate they could support to avoid buffering (Except in one location with terrible wireless service).
Have to admit I’m baffled how a much less mature project can get this right from the start, but Plex can’t / won’t…
It’s actually a very simple answer to why it’s like this: Old code and Technical debt.
Plex is older, hence it’s a lot harder to change things. Which is why I’m kind of annoyed that Plex is refusing to at least change the client default value while we wait for “the solution”.
have we had any kind of feedback from Plex about this? it’s clearly the single most asked for feature. I find myself here again after 4 users watched movies @ 3mbps for no reason tonight…
Not lately.
I assume work has been abandoned.
Nah, of course not. Getting them to care is very hard…
I saw Linus tech tips throw out some plex related content so I made sure he knows what’s sponsoring him for that content 
Beyond that, asking for this feature on reddit got me 67 upvotes in 3 days, demand is still high and flexplex’s attention span is simply nonexistent 
+1 if this thread is still alive ?
Been watching this thread for years now (between this and the original post). Odds are Plex devs have it muted by this point.
i had this exact thought this morning & it’s what prompted me to check this thread.
default-settings transcoding is basically like mining crypto but the only consensus algorithm involved is thousands of server operators praying it will finally change
I did a clean install of the Plex app on my Android smart TV tonight (v. 9.8.2) as part of tracking down a bug, and when I went to the settings to turn on HDMI passthrough and refresh rate switching I noticed Remote Streaming was set to “Maximum” - this was right after I’d authorized the newly installed app on my account.
To double-check, I just nuked the app on my Fire Stick. Cleared data first and rebooted it afterwards, and reinstalled from the Amazon App Store…
You guys sure this is still an issue?
Good catch. I see the same on an Onn 4K Android TV streaming box I just reset (9.8.2 as well).
could it be that streaming setting are now sticky to account and sync across devices???
crossing my fingers I’m wrong
Interesting, something has changed on the android app, seems to be ‘convert automatically’ on new installs, which on all my tests is direct playing
