Yes, yes, and yes. It’s been 3 years now, and I think it’s time we see one of the most popular features be implemented.
PLEASE LIKE THE FIRST POST ON THIS THREAD: THIS IS HOW YOU VOTE.
+100. I agree with many others about the per-user cap being meaningless. It sucks to throttle multiple people down to ■■■■■■ speeds. It’d be better to be able to tell Plex, “I have NN upstream available, I wish to have no more than Z users at full-speed user this.”
Any additional users attempting to stream will get a “Too many streams” error or whatever.
From an IT sys admin perspective, here’s my two cents:
It would be GREAT to have this feature to force throttle shared users on the sever side. The argument I have deals greatly with the technical expertise of my Plex Friends and their current systems. Almost EVERY person that I’ve shared my content with knows little to none about setup and configuration. They give just enough effort to make an account, “friend” their account with mine, and go! And, almost all call me for any technical help anyway, which I bet we all have. My home network has a 22mbps upload pipe. Just about all of my content may be directly streamed with no transcoding at that rate to their devices. The idea that keeps me awake at night is that they are unable to tell any difference in 1080p at 8mbps and 1080p at 20mbps, or original quality. If so, having a server side hard set throttle feature would mean a huge saving in data usage for me, and they would still see no different between the two. It’s wasted data, IMO!
So, really, having this feature helps me help them by having a greater server uptime, instead of cutting remote access off to not be charged more by my ISP. Even after, everyone is still happy with no sacrifice made. I wont demand that this be a feature, but it would be luxurious to have and would keep me from monitoring my network as heavily.
I’ve voted yes on this one, as I’ve done for many other ‘server side’ control requests.
Plex devs, please make it happen. (And creating secondary files in lower size/bitrate does NOT count (ie, recently added “Optimize” feature))
Feature request opened in 2013, it’s 2016. I’d LOVE to have this but I’m not holding my breath.
This IS coming, guys… https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/199774/0-9-15-0-uhm-guys-see-if-you-see-what-i-see
The negativity isn’t helping matters at all…
Combining the optimize media and bitrate limits together could be a huge feature set, especially for people running on low bandwidth connections.
@MikeG6.5 why would I want another full set of all my video files under optimized videos? Storage is a precious resource.
@blurb2m said:
@MikeG6.5 why would I want another full set of all my video files under optimized videos? Storage is a precious resource.
It’s not for everyone but suppose you only have 10 to 15Mb upload to the Internet. You may want high quality/original 1080p shows for your own use in your house BUT MIGHT want pre-transcoded 720p/4Mb files available to stream to friends/family if you share.
OR suppose you have a client that can playback h.265 or VC1 encoded files but also have clients that can play these. Many servers can’t transcode these file types fast enough to stream them.
It’s a choice that will make life easier for some people. Others won’t have the need for this.
Carlo
Not at all… Storage is cheap… Let’s say you have all of your media in high bitrate 1080p MKV’s. (20Mbps or greater) And for this discussion you have a CPU with say 10K passmarks. Let’s further say you have a 20Mbps connection. Now, if you share out with 4 friends, that means you are going to need to set them up with 4Mbps bitrate caps to make sure you don’t saturate your upload side, as well as give you some breathing space for your own internet connection.
Ok, well, everything looks good math wise, right? You should be able to transcode up to 5 sessions at a time, right? Wrong… That 2K passmark figure for transcoding a 1080p stream is for an average of about 8Mbps on the media. So if your media is all 8Mbps or less you could probably get by with no problems. But we already said you have 20Mbps, so you are going to need between 3K and 4K passmarks per stream. Now you need a CPU with at least 16K passmarks to be able to stream to your 4 friends remotely at the 4Mbps streaming cap you set them up with. Keep in mind we haven’t added in transcoding for subtitles yet, either…
OTOH, if you set them up with a 4Mbps bitrate limit, and then optimized the media to a 4Mbps version for them, you can stream to all of them from those versions and still have a lot of the 10K passmark CPU available for other things. The CPU is just directing the traffic and not actually modifying the media as it stream. CPU usage is almost nothing per stream.
Price out the 16K passmark CPU. Then let’s expand on this idea a bit and say you have 100Mbps upload. Same media as before. 20-25 clients all at 4Mbps, and then transcoding on-demand. 20 clients x 4K passmarks means you would need 80K passmarks to be able to stream to them. Doing it Direct Play and you may take up to 50% or 60% of that 10K passmark CPU you have in the original machine.
A 3TB drive runs right around $125, and can hold a LOT of optimized versions for you to stream to your users. But an 80K passmark machine? Likely the GNP of a small nation to get one into someone’s hands. At least it’s cost is higher than most any of us are going to feel comfortable spending on a service we can’t legally charge for.
Scalability is the issue here, and the only way to scale up usage is to plan for it. That means, ultimately, you are going to have to provide the media in the bitrates you limit people to in order to scale up with more people. Storage is cheap. High end CPUs at the scales we are discussing here isn’t cheap.
It’s your call, but as you start doing more sharing you are going to realize pretty darned quick that the CPU is a bottleneck if you force transcoding on everything. If you can Direct Play the same thing, then CPU isn’t the bottle neck, but the connection is. A low passmark CPU with the media optimized for Direct Play can easily outperform a high passmark system that relies strictly on transcoding.
If all you do is stream to 2-3 people and you have the CPU for it, no big deal. Do it like you are now, But if you start adding more people to your user’s list, then you are going to want to take a hard look at storing more bitrate versions of your media.
@cayars said:
@blurb2m said:
@MikeG6.5 why would I want another full set of all my video files under optimized videos? Storage is a precious resource.It’s not for everyone but suppose you only have 10 to 15Mb upload to the Internet.
Ha! There are a ton of us Time Warner customers that get limited to 5Mb upload, and that is for “Turbo”. We need the bandwidth limiter. I have plenty of CPU, but limited bandwidth. Would be nice to be able to configure the server to support those environments.
@MikeG6.5 I am not trying to displace Netflix as far as capacity of simultaneous streams. I’d rather store one copy in x265, support roughly 5 users, not have to spend the money to replace every drive in my RAID with higher capacity, and just have the ability to limit users bitrate and stream count (per day or week).
I have no problem with people watching things off me. I would just prefer to have options as far as limiting binges without cutting external access to all or having to revoke.
@MikeG6.5 said:
OTOH, if you set them up with a 4Mbps bitrate limit, and then optimized the media to a 4Mbps version for them, you can stream to all of them from those versions and still have a lot of the 10K passmark CPU available for other things. The CPU is just directing the traffic and not actually modifying the media as it stream. CPU usage is almost nothing per stream.
This is what I am currently using Cloud Sync for, any family member that is outside of the house only gets a share to the Cloud Sync server. That way my CPU isn’t impacted or my bandwidth by there streaming
…> @hthighway said:
@MikeG6.5 said:
OTOH, if you set them up with a 4Mbps bitrate limit, and then optimized the media to a 4Mbps version for them, you can stream to all of them from those versions and still have a lot of the 10K passmark CPU available for other things. The CPU is just directing the traffic and not actually modifying the media as it stream. CPU usage is almost nothing per stream.
This is what I am currently using
Cloud Syncfor, any family member that is outside of the house only gets a share to theCloud Syncserver. That way my CPU isn’t impacted or my bandwidth by there streaming
That is likely the only reason I would ever think of using any cloud storage, period… But even then it puts more control in someone else’s hands and out of mine.
@blurb2m said:
@MikeG6.5 I am not trying to displace Netflix as far as capacity of simultaneous streams. I’d rather store one copy in x265, support roughly 5 users, not have to spend the money to replace every drive in my RAID with higher capacity, and just have the ability to limit users bitrate and stream count (per day or week).
I have no problem with people watching things off me. I would just prefer to have options as far as limiting binges without cutting external access to all or having to revoke.
And you are storing your media in a codec that isn’t supported by most clients because most devices aren’t able to support it. You are using that codec because the files are smaller, so you can cram more media on your existing storage.
That means that almost every stream you have is transcoded to almost every client app that Plex has. It wouldn’t work for me at all. And for a lot of other people it would create more problems then it would solve.
That CPU you have won’t handle 5 simultaneous 20Mbps transcodes, just so you are aware of that right off. You’ll be lucky to get more than 2 if all of your media is high bitrate stuff. PassMark - Intel Core i7-4770 @ 3.40GHz - Price performance comparison
Compare that passmark score with the highest rated CPU that they have benchmarked: PassMark - Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 @ 2.30GHz - Price performance comparison And then take a look at the cost of that high passmark CPU. That’s $3700+ just for the CPU, not counting the MoBo or other hardware to run it on… And that’s only transcoding 4-7 20Mbps streams for a CPU that fast.
With bitrate limits and optimized media versions to support the limits, your users are going to be buffering less and your PMS is going to run cooler and more efficiently. But you know, hey, this is working for you. Just hope your 5 friends don’t talk to their 5 friends and the next thing you know you have 15 or 20 trying to stream… That’s how it snowballs
I know I’m not going to convince you that this is a viable solution for a lot of people. Most people using Plex think like you do. “I have the media and the CPU so just let the CPU do the work to stream the media out.” All it would take is adding another 3-5TB USB drive to put those extra copies on. No need for Raid anything in that case, as you really wouldn’t need to worry about what happens to the media… It could be as volatile as you wanted it to be.
Your initial comment is what I have issue with, though… Storage is NOT precious. Storage is CHEAP! And getting much cheaper as time goes on. Over-all people are much more likely to get better performance from spending $150 or so for an additional drive and having multiple versions of their media than they would by spending $3700 for that uber-fast CPU and rely on transcoding everything.
@blurb2m said:
@MikeG6.5 I am not trying to displace Netflix as far as capacity of simultaneous streams. I’d rather store one copy in x265, support roughly 5 users, not have to spend the money to replace every drive in my RAID with higher capacity, and just have the ability to limit users bitrate and stream count (per day or week).
I have no problem with people watching things off me. I would just prefer to have options as far as limiting binges without cutting external access to all or having to revoke.
The problem with this is that there are very few clients that can use 265 at present. This slowly growing but at present they are expensive. So you would end up having to probably do a lot of transcoding to these clients and I doubt you have the CPU for this. 265 to 264 transcoding is VERY CPU intensive.
That of course if a very generalized statement but it takes a lot more resources to work/transcode 265 than 264.
So while 265 is great for storage space it’s lousey for CPU in the Plex world at present UNLESS you have the dedicated hardware and willingness to go 265 across the board. It might very well be 2 years time before we’ll be able to easily use 265 for normal streaming to people outside our houses as we don’t get to easily control what hardware they have.
Of course it’s your server and you get to dictate who has access. :)> @hthighway said:
@MikeG6.5 said:
OTOH, if you set them up with a 4Mbps bitrate limit, and then optimized the media to a 4Mbps version for them, you can stream to all of them from those versions and still have a lot of the 10K passmark CPU available for other things. The CPU is just directing the traffic and not actually modifying the media as it stream. CPU usage is almost nothing per stream.
This is what I am currently using
Cloud Syncfor, any family member that is outside of the house only gets a share to theCloud Syncserver. That way my CPU isn’t impacted or my bandwidth by there streaming
@hthighway do you fully share all your movies and TV shows via the cloud?
@MikeG6.5 said:
That is likely the only reason I would ever think of using any cloud storage, period… But even then it puts more control in someone else’s hands and out of mine.
I see it as getting control back, as currently the server admin as no control over shared users choices of bitrate or how many simultaneous streams they use. At least with this use of Cloud Sync in this way I only have have to spend the upload bandwidth once to push it to the cloud, and then the users can stream as they like from the cloud without impacting my usage.
@cayars said:
@hthighway do you fully share all your movies and TV shows via the cloud?
Not all, but slowly working on it, about 45% of the Film Library and about 30% of the TV Shows so far
+1! Would be awesome since I am sharing with +10 people.
Make this happen, please! Agreed with above posts that most people only put forward the effort of creating the account and using the software. My 89 year old grandmother does not go in and lower the quality on her streams. This would be awesome if we could control the quality from the server side (ideally per user).
I need this !
+1
I’m beginning to accrue a decent size of friends and I’m bumping into upload bandwidth issues.
