A lot of us understand how the new Quality Suggestions functionality works, but I would imagine most of the folks on this now aging thread would agree with me when I again reiterate that the issue we have is allowing our invited family and friends to unduly stress our servers if we, as server owners, CHOOSE not to allow their lack of bandwidth dictate the experience for all other users on our systems. I am not sure how to put it any simpler, but that’s literally the gist of this multi-year thread.
Quality Suggestions was the solution to this issue. I think it is very unlikely that Plex will pivot to allow server owners to set client-side settings. It might not be a perfect solution in its current form, but I would expect will continue to develop and expand the feature.
The reason I’ve turned off suggestions is that if you’re on a connection that is a little bit slow in the beginning it will buffer and suggest lowering the quality. Wifi often does this where the bandwidth is stabilizing after a few seconds, but at that point Plex already assumes the connection is too slow, when it actually isn’t. It’s annoying getting the unnecessary prompt at the start of every stream. It happened a lot on my Google TV/Chromecast.
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Was this locally? Because Quality Suggestions should only be for remote connections. I was testing between Australia and NZ, Australia and the US, and Australia and the UK
I’m pretty sure it was triggering for both, but it’s been a while as I’ve turned it off.
Hi Dave
Quality Suggestion seems to be working correctly for my users or, more likely, they don’t mention it.
The end user has to say “yeah, this is buffering a lot, I’d like a lower quality with smooth playback”.
In reality, the end user says “I don’t know what Plex is asking me. I’ll press whatever button makes it go away.”. 
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That sounds very practical, but that’s not how it actually happens. I have 300mb upload on fiber so I never see buffering unless client or server are having line issues and I wouldn’t want my quality settings changed for that.
Here’s how it actually flows:
1: Play video
2: Quality suggestion pops up in the first 5 seconds
3: I hit back to exit the video, go into Plex settings
3a: Adjust Automatically: Off
3b: Quality Suggestions: Off
3c: Remote Streaming Quality: Maximum
4: I go back to my video and and I don’t ever buffer or think of this feature again until there’s a fresh device with these frustrating default settings.
This feature isn’t functioning as described.
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I have Disable video stream transcoding checked in my Plex server Settings>Transcoder settings page, yet whenever a new user is invited to a Library on this same server, their Settings>Quality>Video Quality option does not default to ‘Maximum’… instead it’s xx Mbps, xxxxp, which of course prevents them from being able to stream from my server. I have to instruct every user I invite to my Plex share (usually friends/family who have never used Plex) to go into their Plex settings and change Video Quality to Maximum. This can be a chore as most of my users are not tech savvy, I may also not be familiar with the Plex settings layout for their device when assisting over the phone.
If video transcoding is disabled server side, SURELY the default behaviour of clients should not be to transcode…? With transcoding turned off, why does the Video Quality setting of invited users not default to Maximum?
Is there a workaround for this seemingly nonsensical behaviour?
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This is because the Video Quality setting on the playback device is specific to that device and not to any particular server’s user. This device can connect to your server or someone else’s, and it shouldn’t be influenced by the server’s settings. If the device is connected to multiple servers, each server’s settings might differ, so the server settings and the playback device settings are independent of each other.
Therefore, regardless of the server settings, the playback device’s quality setting should default to Highest Quality, rather than being restricted to a low level.
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I second this. I’ve gotten many quality suggestions on my own local network before turning the settings off.
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Here we are, 6 years after the initial post, and they still can’t just flip a switch to set the default bitrate to maximum, somehow.
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Sadly this is the only workaround that has worked for me: Default All Clients to Max Internet Streaming - #1716 by arm3n
Why am I seeing it set to maximum on my new installs recently? Like when I installed Plex on my Fire Stick and on my friend’s Shield.
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In case this gets missed in this thread, please remember Playback Quality Suggestions was implemented and addresses the issue of the default remote bandwidth limit which we previously had set.
This article covers this including which client devices are supported: https://support.plex.tv/articles/quality-suggestions/
That I know. However, the implementation of that feature is not that great. Do you agree?
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Could you elaborate?
Two things:
-
In my Fire Stick 4K Max (2nd gen) and Sony Google OS TV, quality suggestions to lower the quality usually appear (not always) when you play a 4K movie even though there is enough bandwidth with a local PMS. If you don’t go with the suggestion, nothing happens. No buffering or anything and is proof enough that bandwidth is enough. This does not happen with my Shield on the same network.
-
For all my and my remote users devices, as soon as you go with the suggestion, you will no longer be able to open the playback menu! You can’t rewind, forward, change subtitles, etc.
For me, the most annoying is item #2. Why can you not fix this? Isn’t it a very easy thing to fix?
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This doesn’t solve any issues for the following reasons:
1.) It only works on a handful of player platforms
2.) Even on those platforms that it is stated to work on, neither me nor any of my users have ever seen it pop up, despite my server and their client being capable of much higher quality settings. I can’t even get this feature to pop up in my own local testing.
3.) Seems like just setting “maximum available quality” by default, except with more steps, and it doesn’t work.
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I would even settle for a very simple change, elsewhere called for by others:
When a server owner sets video transcoding off, add a client-side message alerting the users of this choice, and urging them to utilize Max/Original settings (extra credit if Plex client takes the user there or changes it). The lack of this functionality is the reason admins like myself have resorted to using Tautulli to force-stop streams for users and generate a message explaining these instructions. Thanks for listening!
On my Chromecast with Google TV 4K, I frequently experienced that if the buffer was ever so slightly slow to fill up at the beginning of the stream it would show the downgrade prompt even though it never really was an issue during playback once it got going. It was easier to just disable it altogether and never see the prompt as it was utterly pointless. The feature isn’t very good at dealing with WiFi being WiFi in my experience.
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