Ok, so this is a little embarrassing, but in my infinite wisdom i thought that if the file was 4K that plex would play it on 4K.
I don’t know why i thought that, I’m ashamed that i did, but i realized you have to set the quality to the max level it will stream of to the 4K level specifically if you want it to stream in 4K. You would think when so many files wouldn’t play because it would say “server isn’t powerful enough” that would’ve thrown a few red flags…But i digress
Anyways, i just went through ALL my devices and set the quality to maximum and everything runs smooth (yay), but i noticed that on a few devices, namely the 4K Apple TV and my 4K OLED i had the option to select 4K 30Mbps, but on other devices like my Galaxy 22 Ultra, Galaxy tab 9 Ultra,new surface studio, and most confusing my Google TV that if supposed to support 4K all seemed to “top out” at 1080p 20Mbps.
Though i know these devices can all support 2K minimum, the top option was 1080p.
I selected “maximum”, but i don’t know if that means the maximum the device supports, or that 1080p.
So I’m curious if there is any way to verify it one way or the other on said devices?
What you select in those quality settings is whatever plex will see as the hard limit that the client should “get” the video as. That means that when you set it to 1080p 20Mbit/s then everything that is above that (only the bitrate, not the resolution) will be transcoded down to that bitrate.
That is so that you can limit the transfer rates to certain clients if they don’t have that much transfer rate available (like limited download speed) or if your servers upload speed isn’t enough either and you have many clients streaming at the same time (but plex should limit those things on its own).
However, there should be two ways to actually see what is being streamed and at what quality. The first one is the Plex Dashboard. It will list every current stream going on and the necessary information for that stream. Which client device, what bitrate, codecs and possible transcodes. This is useful if you want to troubleshoot remote streams.
The other way would be to enable debug information on the plex app on the client itself.
However, for your problem I think just setting it to “maximum” or “original” will tell plex to stream the video as-is without doing any transcoding (which would also explain any buffering or errors of “server not strong enough”)
Thank you. I’m still confused why i only get the 4K option on 2 of the 3 devices i have that (supposedly) support 4K, but i guess it doesn’t really matter if setting it to original functionally does the same thing.
