Disable direct play

[aerosbitbasher]

Direct play really doesn’t work well on android or Samsung TV. Even on low bit rate videos (1.5Mbps) it pushes the throughout up to 23-25Mbps and judders continuously.
None of the settings for maximum bandwidth limit, automatically adjust, don’t transcode small videos seem to make any difference. It even makes it impossible to skip when streaming live tv which is playing from the start while recording.
The only thing that seems to work is to change the max H.264 to something low like 2.2 so that the transcoder is forced into action on most videos or manually change the quality to low, then back to auto every time you play a video.
Please can we have an option on the server or the client (preferably on a client by client basis) to not use direct play or define a priority order of the different play methods to use.

[teshiburu]

Whut… direct play works fine for me on every client device i have.

The spike in bandwidth is due to your device getting the file as it needs it…

You’re goal should be always direct play, you need to look at your setup and see whats causing your stuttering…

[aerosbitbasher]

So give me a clue into looking and fixing why the tv pulls a constant 25Mbps from the server, the buffer bar on the tv initially shows about 30s worth of data which takes about 4 seconds to buffer.
The buffer bar then doesn’t keep up with playback, in fact despite pulling a constant 25Mbps while playback is going on, the buffer bar doesn’t move. The video will then stop for a few seconds and then the buffer bar will leap again.
The video is 12 minutes long and only 125MB, it could pull the whole file in 30 seconds.
I agree, I’d love to use direct play for everything, but if you force transcode it works, and I’d vastly prefer convenient, impercievably reduced quality, inefficiently processed delivery of my content that works, over an idealistic philosophy of what I should use, that doesn’t work.
I want to just watch my content without spending hours messing around with technical details - that’s what used to make PLEX so good - it’s automatic settings just worked out of the box for everything without trying to be technically clever for the sake of it.