TL;DR Plex shouldn’t play 4k content on a 1080p screen when there’s a 1080p version available, even if it’s in another directory.
This feature as is, works about half the time for me.
I’ve tested this with a fire stick, the windows desktop client and the webui in chrome. Each of which is configured to play Maximum quality. I tried to Use recommended settings and that didn’t affect my results.
For testing purposes, I have several TV Series in my library with both 4k and 1080p versions. I also have several Movies with both 4k and 1080p versions. 4k and 1080p versions of each are in separate directories within their respective libraries.
I have read the following article.
Although I know my setup does not conform to that 100% because the article says both versions need to be in the same directory. However, Plex still does combine the two versions from different directories into one listing, automatically.
But it does not always play the correct version when playing on a 1080p screen. Quite often i find it’s playing a 4k version, or even worse transcoding from the 4k version to 1080p, when there’s a perfectly good 1080p copy already associated with that listing.
At first I thought it might just be for TV shows, but then i started testing it and found Movies behaved similarly.
Expecting my clients to know how to go in and play the correct version is unreasonable, this should be automatic. I shouldn’t have to seperate my 4k content if i also keep a 1080p copy along side it in the library. Even if it’s in a separate directory.
Thank you all in advance for your time and I hope this is an easily accomplished feature request.
It’s probably worth mentioning on my Windows PC, I do have a 4k tv physically connected, but it is disconnected in windows display settings for these tests.
There’s an existing feature suggestion covering this topic.
I suggest you vote/comment in this thread instead to avoid distracting/dispersing votes by too many duplicates
I read their post prior to creating my post. They’re certainly experiencing a similar issue, however I came here mainly because of TV Series episodes having issues. There is no reference in any documentation that i have found to Multi-Version TV Support. I only used Movies as a testing method to reproduce my issue. I was able to produce logs in order to help facilitate the process. Their post is over 2 years old without a single reply…
Please correct me if I’m getting your suggestion wrong. The way I’ve been reading it, you’re asking for Plex to improve which quality/version of an item (movie/tv-episode/…) is selected when playing it on a device – e.g. not to pick a 4K version on your 1080p TV if there is a 1080p version of the same video.
While the post I linked will also specifically mention this for movies… the underlying story is the same – picking the right / best available version for that client to get the best possible quality with the minimum amount of transcoding (or no transcoding at all).
That’s how feature suggestions work. They’re getting even less attention if the same keeps getting requested in new threads (hence the rules for the feature suggestion category).
Sorry I added confusion earlier; I was skimming and didn’t notice this was in Feature Suggestions.
I believe that the current multiple version support is similar-or-identical for Movies & TV Shows. In both cases you can manually Play Version ..., or Plex will choose one to play.
So to agree with Tom, maybe this is better as an extension to the other request.
I haven’t looked at the logs, but out of curiosity - did you provide all of the versions, or were any created by using the Plex Optimize feature? I wonder if the behavior is different. (Also, maybe that’s a better question for the other thread … I’ll go read it …)
