I’ve a large number of remote viewers subscribing to my Plex server, and of course a limited amount of upload bandwidth to go around. I ask each user to set their client’s remote playback quality to “3 Mbps / 720p” or lower as needed to ensure everyone gets a piece of the pie.
For a while now, I’ve also asked people to disable DirectPlay/DirectStream as these, while easier on the server, seem to consume more bandwidth overall, though I admit my monitoring tools and methods aren’t as precise as I’d like them to be.
I’d like to know if anyone can clarify or help me understand the relationship between DirectPlay/DirectStream and the Remote playback quality value. For example, if DirectPlay/DirectStream are enabled, and a user selects media which is in 1080p (native bitrate of, oh, let’s say 8,000 kbps for the video stream), BUT the Remote quality is still set to 3 Mbps / 720p, will Plex automatically transcode (thus respecting the remote playback setting), or will it ignore this and DirectPlay/DirectStream the media?
I guess in the end I’m trying to understand if it makes any difference for me to have people disable DirectPlay/DirectStream if their client is already set to a remote playback quality value that is lower than the media’s native bitrate. I certainly WANT to have people use DirectPlay/DirectStream as it’s less load on the server, but my paramount priority is restricting people to 3 Mbps of bandwidth for any given media file, and my observations over time seem to indicate that using DirectPlay/DirectStream will override or bypass the remote playback quality value.
Hope this question makes sense - happy to clarify if more info is needed!
Official Plex clients do honour the bitrate setting first. (Just keep in mind that the bitrate limitation must be set at the client side, not in your server.)
If Direct Play or Direct Stream is possible and this can be done with honoring the e.g. 3mbps restriction set, then it will be done.
A special case is the older Samsung Smarthub client. This one needs to explicitly enable transcoding.
I never used a Roku or one of the older AppleTV clients, but these maybe have also a different “logic”.
I’ve had a lot of bad luck with this. For example, if i don’t disable direct play/stream on our iphone 6’s they completely ignore the remote quality setting. My folks have a roku 3 that seems to ignore the quality setting too if they are not disabled, but i’m not 100 sure because i had to have them test it and its possible they didn’t set the quality right. although they claim they did. I use plexpy which states if a stream is direct or not as well as windows server 2012’s resource monitor to watch bandwidth utilization to determine if its “working” or not. I haven’t retested this in version 1 of pms yet tho, so its possible they have fixed it already.
@jeramie@idghelp.us said:
I’ve had a lot of bad luck with this. For example, if i don’t disable direct play/stream on our iphone 6’s they completely ignore the remote quality setting. My folks have a roku 3 that seems to ignore the quality setting too if they are not disabled, but i’m not 100 sure because i had to have them test it and its possible they didn’t set the quality right. although they claim they did. I use plexpy which states if a stream is direct or not as well as windows server 2012’s resource monitor to watch bandwidth utilization to determine if its “working” or not. I haven’t retested this in version 1 of pms yet tho, so its possible they have fixed it already.
Have you set these in the actual clients (on the rork device), not just from the plex/web interface?
