If the user is on a metered connection then it is 100% their responsibility to be aware of how much bandwidth they are using and how much they have remaining. Does netflix say “Oh, well I bet a bunch of people have limited bandwidth so lets just give everyone 2mbps quality by default”? Of course not, if they did they’d lose an absurd amount of users who are suddenly perplexed as to why the quality everything they are watching has gone to trash. Anyways, my point is in terms of user experience auto quality should be the default for new clients/users.
Also, having the default at 2mbps is not only frustrating as a server admin, but I’m sure many many users wonder why the quality of what they are watching is so awful. Moviefan.Plex, why are you assuming that the average consumer (who is not maintaining a plex server, only using a plex client) would have intuition to adjust video quality? Especially when no tutorial/UI explanation for first time clients/users. Like one of those things where it highlights each part of the UI, explains what it does, then you hit next (or skip the entire thing).
But what I really find the most annoying out of anything relating to plex quality drama is that, there was a solution/workaround for this. It was by setting a hidden server setting “forceAutoAdjustQuality” to true, and then it would make every auto quality client use auto quality regardless of their quality settings. However, sometime in the past 3-6ish months, this was secretly nerfed and now it no longer works. Funny thing is, this setting still technically works fine. But now there is an HTTP header that was added which acts as a bandaid and forces the max quality to be the users setting WHILE still using auto quality. It’s actually kind of funny, I honestly I don’t know why you didn’t just remove the server setting forceAutoAdjustQuality. But instead went and added bandaids on the client side.
