I guess the frustration on my part is that I don’t understand what the new changes you are working on will actually do.
I was looking forward to the auto-quality feature but understand the dissatisfaction of it not switching to Direct Play. However, at this current time, I have no idea what Plex is actually attempting to achieve in this area.
You mention the needs of the clients, but what I don’t hear is the reception at Plex about the feedback from the Admins that most Clients do not care nor can figure out on their own how to control their data streams. It continually puts us Admins in the tech support seat for all of our users. The current default of 2 Mbps dumps the Admins into the tech support seat immediately as our users experience SD video from the get-go.
I understand the needs of the Clients and I also understand the needs of the server Admins. I’m all for giving as much control to both groups as possible, but us Admins are usually the techies, while our users are not.
I also don’t see the problem with a Client connecting to multiple servers. Why can’t Plex client have different settings per server? Also, why can’t an Admin control what those default settings are? You can still allow the Clients to change those settings away from the defaults, again per server.
I think this feature could be done easly from server side.
As plex is a server and application where we share to our relatives/home users mostly, there should not be a reason to force us transcode everytime from 4K to 720p. If the user signs for our plex server, they should know that the quality of content will be more than netflix/disney etc or any other television channel.
There is an option to disable transcode or not, there you can create an option to let us decide the transcodeable minimum bitrates.
For instance, I dont want to leave 5-6 different type of 1080ps, 720ps. I can set up to transcode setting minimum to 1080p and maximum to 4K, so users can only see in their clients the minimum bitrate we set.
This is tooooooo easy to set, why dont you guys just do it and let go ?
This is a simple answer, don’t watch my content! They don’t pay me anything and legally I don’t think they are allowed to if I had any inclination. Also, cheapskate (hypothetical user, not DaveBinM), I have to pay for hardware to transcode and the power to do it with, so you can save your monthly cap? What? This makes it sound like Plex thinks we are getting paid for this.
This is the crux of all issues we have between forum posters and Plex employees. To Plex, the customers are the users we share our libraries to because they outnumber us. We control the users though, not Plex, we can take our ball and go home. The other options aren’t bad at all.
That’s awesome but @elan said this to me in 2019.
I would love it if someone would answer the one follow up question. What is the reason that some clients default to 2mbps and some 4? My guess was demographics of who buys which device and nobody has had any other guesses really.
Can we at least figure out why devices keep reverting to a lower quality after you’ve already changed it?
If you have a Fire TV or know someone who uses one, you might want to check your quality settings.
I noticed 2 that reverted from Max back to 720p yesterday but don’t know when it happened or why
I hope this didn’t happen to everyone using my sever
I guess this has some benefits
I can work on my NAS and make breakfast at the same time
As I mentioned previously, we’re working towards giving end users the best possible quality. For some, that may mean Original/Direct Play, and for others, they may still need to transcode if they have insufficient bandwidth, or if they choose to limit their data usage.
but no-one said that users shouldn’t be able to transcode or limite their data usage, we are saying that it shouldn’t be the default. Or that at least, this default should be set higher, like 1080 4mbps for example. There is virtually zero case where going from 2mbps to 4 mbps would kill someone’s data cap.
But also an absolutely baffling concept in many parts of the world. With the exception of phones data caps aren’t a thing here. This statement has come up several times over the years in your communication, sounds like this might a big reason for not fixing this issue sooner, which is what I find frustrating.
If I would have been able to force my clients to use direct stream on all their devices except phones, both me and them would have had pretty much zero issues.
Until the issue is fixed (any year now) I assume locking the thread would only fan the flame.
This could be so simple. First time the user plays content on a device from a server they are asked:
Would you like to play the original quality or transcode it to a lower bitrate?
And that setting could then be stored per client/server combination in the client. As much as I would enjoy enforcing it on the server side, prompting it on the client would also alleviate much of the hassle.
Default to MAX.
Admins can manually “Limit remote stream bitrate” already.
Clients can manually set “Video quality” for data caps and other client reasons.
How many times over the years have I came back to this thread to see the same excuses. Just let us default to Max - let us sort out any problems that causes, if it causes us problems.
1GB upload sitting idle while my CPU is frying eggs. It’s maddening.
I’m not an admin blessed with a 1GB upload. But, I do set the “Limit remote stream bitrate” to 8Mbps which the server and upload can handle. This is WAY better than the default 2Mbps I’ve seen my clients defaulting to. Heck, I’d personally be happy with 4Mbps as a default. But I get why MAX is better…I can downgrade it as needed with the tools currently available.
You might think that in the middle of an energy crisis and with electricity prices going through the roof the responsable thing to do would be avoiding unneeded transcodes. But no.
