I have several people who want to watch from my server who are out in the boonies and it buffers too much for them. No problems for people on fair to decent internet. They don’t want to sack quality that much so is there a setting i’m missing to increase the buffer for them (i don’t care if its everyone) so they can actually watch a video? Maybe increase the buffer double what it is now so they dont have any issues? I have searched for this many times but cant find anything straight forward so please dont flame me. Also this is my first post and loving Plex!!! 
@huntsforu said:
I have several people who want to watch from my server who are out in the boonies and it buffers too much for them. No problems for people on fair to decent internet. They don’t want to sack quality that much so is there a setting i’m missing to increase the buffer for them (i don’t care if its everyone) so they can actually watch a video? Maybe increase the buffer double what it is now so they dont have any issues? I have searched for this many times but cant find anything straight forward so please dont flame me. Also this is my first post and loving Plex!!!
Welcome to the forums!
There is no setting to increase a buffer, plex is designed to deliver the content just as it is needed.
Plex doesn’t have a “buffer” in the terms I think you’re referring to, as in the way Youtube works. With Plex, your best option is to make sure that the media you’re presenting to these clients are all within their limits - network up/down speed, codecs and containers etc. Plex is a client-centric application, meaning that the client decides what it thinks is best (or what the user, if IT-capable one, has decided) and thus requesting that from the server. There isn’t much that you can control beyond instructing your users to request something that suits their limitations and that you have said media to serve them under said networking conditions.
@hthighway said:
@huntsforu said:
I have several people who want to watch from my server who are out in the boonies and it buffers too much for them. No problems for people on fair to decent internet. They don’t want to sack quality that much so is there a setting i’m missing to increase the buffer for them (i don’t care if its everyone) so they can actually watch a video? Maybe increase the buffer double what it is now so they dont have any issues? I have searched for this many times but cant find anything straight forward so please dont flame me. Also this is my first post and loving Plex!!!Welcome to the forums!
There is no setting to increase a buffer, plex is designed to deliver the content just as it is needed.
So basically i will need to show them all how to lower the quality manually? It seems such a nice system would lower the quality to whatever is watchable automatically like Netflix or Youtube. That in the works maybe?
You’re asking about adaptive bit-rate I believe. Plex doesn’t do that either, yet.
Perfect. Thanks guys! Ill see if that is a feature request and vote it. Appreciate the prompt response!
@huntsforu said:
So basically i will need to show them all how to lower the quality manually? It seems such a nice system would lower the quality to whatever is watchable automatically like Netflix or Youtube. That in the works maybe?
How it work is each client/device needs the max download speed (quality) setting set only once.
After that is set no matter what quality the media is that yo have stored on your server the client will automatically transcode it to meet the client quality setting.
@hthighway said:
@huntsforu said:
So basically i will need to show them all how to lower the quality manually? It seems such a nice system would lower the quality to whatever is watchable automatically like Netflix or Youtube. That in the works maybe?How it work is each client/device needs the max download speed (quality) setting set only once.
After that is set no matter what quality the media is that yo have stored on your server the client will automatically transcode it to meet the client quality setting.
Yea they are older, so the tech saviness is just not there lol. I can set it for them though for sure. That adaptive bitrate thing would be amazing though to eliminate these issues. I saw a lot of people posting about buffer problems, just no answers that made any sense to me. Thank you all again. I really appreciate the fast response!
This is absolutely a feasible feature addition, but the overhead on the content server is quite serious. The clients need to detect the packet loss. This is done by watching the TCP window size. There is a buffer that must exist to receive the traffic in the client. If this is draining too fast to the screen, it will be picked up by watching it on a timer. When a consecutive number of these limits are hit in rapid succession, then it should automatically trigger a downgrade in the quality of the stream. Since re-computing the stream is painful, the server needs to do a lot of work finding the last key-frame and re-encoding to the now-lower bitrate. The switchover time would likely not be seamless.
This also means that the server needs to be aware of it’s own limitations and “stop” a client either based on the number of concurrent streams (where all clients begin to downgrade to support another stream of data) or based on some threshold set by the admin based on available bandwidth. There stil is not a good way to “auto-detect” available bandwidth from end-to-end, it has to be done with loss (and hence the TCP window sizes).
The other benefit here is how far ahead of each client the server needs to be in transcoding, since this is a variable, this can be a configuration option per-stream.
End-users are not thinking about bandwidth and have no idea what “4Mbps 720p” means.
Actually this isn’t the case at all. No changes to the server are needed. You are confusing adaptive bitrates to buffering.
Buffering is a client feature. To the server there is little difference at all. It’s no different than allowing a download. The same amount of bits will get exhanged either way. The buffer however would allow people on an iffy connection to pause and let the buffer fill (youtube style). It would also help to smooth out much of the iffy connection problems we currently see with Plex.
Carlo
yes, this is what I proposed. The text you’re zeroing in on is : “the overhead on the content server is quite serious”. Which refer to the CPU overhead in managing/changing streams that frequently change quality, a different numbers of bits will get exchanged. The overhead is CPU, not bandwidth. This does not mean that the development work is hard.
@beadon1 said:
yes, this is what I proposed. The text you’re zeroing in on is : “the overhead on the content server is quite serious”. Which refer to the CPU overhead in managing/changing streams that frequently change quality, a different numbers of bits will get exchanged. The overhead is CPU, not bandwidth. This does not mean that the development work is hard.
Yeah but that’s going to be an issue with just adaptive bitrate. Buffering won’t change the bitrate on the server side once you start watching.
