# Optimized videos are being transcoded

**URL:** <https://forums.plex.tv/t/optimized-videos-are-being-transcoded/186729>\
**Category:** General Discussions\
**Created:** [March 30, 2017, 10:46am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/optimized-videos-are-being-transcoded/186729 "2017-03-30T10:46:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jesse000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b4bc9f/32.png) [@jesse000](https://forums.plex.tv/u/jesse000)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2017, 10:46am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/optimized-videos-are-being-transcoded/186729/1 "2017-03-30T10:46:48Z")

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I have optimized a bunch of movies for “Mobile”.  
I thought that this was the equivalent of 4Mbps 720p.  
(Some i optimized as custom 4Mbps 720p)  
Additonally i changed the setting “Limit remote stream bitrate” to 4Mbps 720p.  
I would have expected this to work with Direct Stream or Direct Play but it always starts transcoding.  
When i raise the remote limit to 8Mbps all works fine.  
Why is that?

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**Author:** ![ChuckPa](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/chuckpa/32/79710_2.png) [@ChuckPa](https://forums.plex.tv/u/ChuckPa)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2017, 7:04pm UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/optimized-videos-are-being-transcoded/186729/2 "2017-03-30T19:04:02Z")

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if you have a 4 Mbps upload limit set and want to play a 4 Mbps video, something has to give because of the transmission overhead (TCP/IP) and Plex’s protocol. To give a rough estimate if your upload limit is 4 Mbps, You want about 3 7 Mbps encoding (allows for the ~10% of all the overheads and latency combined… remember TCP must acknowledge every packet the server sends)

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**Author:** ![jesse000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b4bc9f/32.png) [@jesse000](https://forums.plex.tv/u/jesse000)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2017, 9:26pm UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/optimized-videos-are-being-transcoded/186729/3 "2017-03-30T21:26:20Z")

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If that’s true I think it’s not implemented very cleverly.  
It think ever user’s expectation would be for the Plex server application to take that into consideration.  
Now I need to re-optimize everything to 3Mbps.

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**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/plex/original/3X/2/a/2acb9765406f63293d357b4ec509ec39aa28f2ad.png) [@system](https://forums.plex.tv/u/system)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2020, 11:02pm UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/optimized-videos-are-being-transcoded/186729/4 "2020-01-07T23:02:24Z")

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