After struggling with buffering playing back RAW 4K demo footage, I noticed there is no option to tell Plex “Buffer for longer” or “Preload this many MB” or “Preload the whole video clip before playing”. I am a Plex Lifetime Pass user and have been using Plex for many years. But a Server-Side preference feature for default playback ‘Buffer Size’ or ‘Preloading’ would be a brilliant thing for myself and I’m sure for other people too.
After searching the Forums it seems there is no way to do this and I’m therefore creating this as a feature request.
Is that not what the Transcoder default throttle buffer is supposed to signal? That’s Settings -> Transcoder -> Show Advanced. I might have misunderstood what it was designed to do, but I can also see how even if working as intended, it might not solve your issue. There’s a difference between buffering faster and flagging the system to stop buffering.
I agree, it would be nice if Plex was sometimes more aggressive with system resource usage. Particularly if it was within our control.
It’s a bit confusing to be honest. I’ve just taken a look at what you suggested. I’m going to guess that is for ‘transcoding’ only and it won’t give me control over buffer time / amount using DirectPlay, which is what I use as I play original quality only.
I remember the bad old days of hitting Play and then Pause, watching the buffer fill, hitting Play, and then being infuriated when playback was interrupted again. It was horrible!
If you’re comfortable waiting for playback to start, desktop and phone clients can download the original. (Or an optimized version.)
And all clients can play a reduced-bitrate version. (Transcoded on the fly, or optimized in advance.) If you let Plex, it will figure out a sustainable bitrate.
Transcoder default throttle applies only when the server is performing transcoding, and affects how far ahead the transcoding process gets compared to what has been requested by the client. It doesn’t affect the client’s download/cache/buffering process.
Such a setting would be only feasible on a computer, which has a large hard drive.
How should this work on a streaming box/STB which has only very limited RAM and close to zero flash memory?
Tip: try Plex Media Player. It has just such a setting.
I think that such a feature would be nice to have as well. I struggle to play 4k HDR (~64Mbit/s) content on my LG B8 TV, streaming remotely over the internet (with 200Mbit/s both locations, avg. 23ms delay). The TV is just barely able to keep up, and just ends up stuttering, not even showing the “buffering spinner”, so a few extra MB of cache would probably make all the difference.
Such a setting would be only feasible on a computer, which has a large hard drive.
How should this work on a streaming box/STB which has only very limited RAM and close to zero flash memory?
I don’t see how it matters how much RAM is available? Surely plex doesn’t use the maximum that is available in all cases at the moment. The setting should of course have a maximum that reflects the current devices limitations. A lot of devices that are used as playback devices have a lot of free RAM available… PS, Xbox, Nvidia shield, phones, and probably a lot of new TVs…
