How to limit people from remote direct playing high bitrate content but not lower bit?

I have a user I am sharing my library with. He’s been direct playing stuff and its worked out well, however he recently tried to stream an 80GB remux movie and it didn’t work for him. It was too high of a bitrate for his bandwidth, and I also am aware that he probably has data caps and streaming an 80GB movie isn’t good for that anyways. So I preferably want movies like this transcoded down to a lower quality but I still want them in 4k (and I still want them in a higher bitrate for me).

To figure it out, I had him set his maximum remote streaming rate to the highest speed that wasn’t unlimited (20 Mbps). Then he played a much lower bitrate (25 mbps) 4k movie and it transcoded down to 1080p. I had him set his speed back to unlimited and then I set the server’s remote stream bitrate limit to 40 Mbps, which should be perfectly acceptable for a 25 mbps bitrate movie, yet it is still playing in 1080p.

He is playing this off a 2018 Samsung TV. His settings page looks like the image below, however this picture was taken before we did tweaks to them, specifically we enabled force direct play and enabled “disable bitrate limiting”.

What am I missing? It really seems like setting the remote streaming limit at any rate either on my side or his caps films to 1080p instead of just transcoding it down to a lower 4k bitrate. Are there settings on his side that we should change or on mine?

I know you can tinker with this under settings>remote access and “limit remote stream bitrate”. as long as your server has the power to transcode this on the fly.

depends on if you want REMOTE streaming rate as unlimited for yourself however.

I would recommend limit from the server. See this article:

Server Settings - Bandwidth and Transcoding Limits

But make sure your hardware can keep up with the transcodes or keep a streaming friendly version of the file on the server for the clients so that you don’t have to transcode as much.

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