How does that solve the problem if not every client is supported?
@drzoidberg33 are those enough sentiments for you to agree how half-baked that feature is?
100% want this to be a thing
5 Years Later?
See, Elan was right. It won’t be a year.
Lol, right. It’s unbelirvable they don’t recognize this issue as an important one.
There’s a long list… lol
Oof, that stings.
This still isn’t fixed lol
It’s 2025 everyone and their grandmothers stream 4k on their phones but plex still transcodes down for no reason.
What platform are you referring to?
On every OS I’m using Plex defaults to Maximum/Unlimited.
Web? Did they fix web?
I’m shocked this is still an issue! I REALLY hope a dev digs into this problem someday.
STILL WAITING FOR THIS FEATURE……. IT’S SO DANG SIMPLE…..
To the PLEX DEVELOPMENT TEAM:
This is not a suggestion—it is an indictment. Your collective failure to heed the vocal demands for critical feature implementation is utterly contemptible.
The platform is rapidly devolving into a monument of shortsightedness, choked by an increasingly intrusive and mercenary paywall structure. To prioritize the relentless monetization of basic functionality over addressing painfully simple, long-standing user requests is not merely poor development; it is an act of corporate malfeasance.
You are demonstrably and inexcusably atrocious at your jobs. You are not just behind your competition; you are actively digging a chasm between the quality users expect and the pathetic state of the product you deliver.
LISTEN UP: Your current trajectory is a betrayal of your user base. This is not just disappointing—it is utterly contemptible and unacceptable.
Checking in on this request 6 years later….
Family member just got a new Roku device for Christmas. Preparing to make yet another visit to their place across the state just to change one stupid setting on Plex for them because they are now transcoding everything to 720p again for no reason on gigabit internet and slamming my CPU. I don’t have the energy to explain to a 75 year old how to change settings in an app again… I want control of my own server. I want to specify my own settings. I don’t want an arbitrary bandwidth saving value from 2016 to be the default. Everything should be max unless I SAY SO.
Can we claim reimbursement from Plex for constantly having to adjust and correct this issue ourselves? After 6 YEARS all we’ve been asking for is the default setting to be changed. We don’t want auto adaptive bandwidth. We want the stupid default value of an ALREADY EXISTING SETTING to be changed. That’s literally all we’ve asked for. “It’s more complicated than that”. No, actually it isn’t. Just change the damn setting. I don’t want it to detect and adjust based on bandwidth or latency or solar flares or I don’t care what the excuse is. I want it at MAX. Always. For every stream. Unchanged. Forever. There are no exceptions. Period.
+1. Fully endorse.
@elan do you think 2026 will be the year? 
Found the problem. The new “Quality Suggestion” feature that I believe they said was supposed to fix this issue is what caused the whole problem. We had already manually set the Quality to Original/Max, but during playback the automatic suggestion was still 4Mb 720p. We had to start the playback and then change it back to Original for that stream to override the automatic suggestion. Every stream recommended 4Mb 720p still. It didn’t matter what we tried to play.
Plex server on 1Gb/1Gb internet and client device on 1Gb/1Gb internet. Both wired devices. Every single thing we tried to play, even with it set to Original/Max, continued to use 4Mb 720p. Turning off Quality Suggestion restored 1080p and stopped the transcoding. Everything now plays normally again.
So not only have they not fixed this after 6 years, in my case the “new feature” that they spent all this time on and said would be better than just changing the default value for us, is now making it worse. Now I have to make sure everyone adjusts their settings to Orignal/Max AND disables the Quality Suggestion feature.
Thanks Plex!
It blows my mind they don’t even acknowledge us in the forums like this all these years with a response to the complaints about not being able to set MAX all the time for our server users. Like, I wonder at this point if someone up at the top just has it out for us and says to all Plex employees “not to respond to those requests because F-em I want 720 to be the norm”
It’s a joke that this is still an issue. Users are generally not tech savvy - they want a Netflix like experience where they just click and play. And as server admins, we don’t want it transcoding all the time for no reason. It creates an adversarial relationship with users for no reason, because the issue is really that Plex refuses to change a simple setting or at least give server owners control to prevent this issue.
