Hi Guys
II am having an issue with plex where it is estimating required bandwidth for direct play to be many times whats needed and forcing a transcode as a result. Instead of direct playing at 3000kbps it transcodes and uses 8000kbps eating bandwidth . Screenshots below
Server Version#: 1.23.3.4707
Player Version#:8.19.3.26473 Shield TV
Generally Speaking:
Plex looks at the file, not only the average bit rate (the ‘2.7Mbps’ shown in your image), but also the peaks (which can be twice the average).
Also Plex must know (wild-ass-guess on my part, by having experience with what Plex shows in the Dashboard at my house) that in order to maintain the quality of an HEVC encode, Plex wants to push that bit rate to ‘sometimes’ 3X the average HEVC rate in a transcode situation - and Plex always prepares for a transcode situation.
See: ‘1’ <—Locals are meant to be played in ALL their glory - Wide Open - Pedal-to-the-metal.
If Remote: keep raising the Remote Quality in the Plex App until Direct Play is achieved.
If Remote, or Local and the bandwidth isn’t sufficient to put that file’s Peaks and Valleys through the available pipe - prepare for a transcode.
Summary:
When guesstimating bit rates and how they’ll react in Plex - go with 3X what you see - then add a bunch.
Recently a remote friend was playing a file that had an average 2.2Mbps rate.
My Dashboard showed Direct Play at 9.5Mbps.
Seems like normal Plexmath to me - and it’s probably correct to figure it that way.
It’s remote
This makes no sense; plex doesn’t stream in real-time; it creates a buffer, so peaks shouldn’t be an issue. If you have a 30-second buffer, it can use that buffer to buy time when a bandwidth-heavy peak comes, and then when it returns to low bandwidth, it can catch back up.
I know for a fact that in my case, it is better just to let it direct stream because if I let it transcode to 8mbps h264, it causes stuttering, but if I expand the max bandwidth to allow a direct play, it fixes it. No, this is not due to my server being slow with transcodes; I can play about 7 transcodes smoothly with local connections.
I often have as many as 5 people streaming remotely from my plex server with about 16mbps of bandwidth, I can’t just increase the bandwidth cap every time I want to direct play something, I will max out my internet connection giving everyone a bad experience, and I don’t want to watch at 480p when I’m away from home.
Is there a mod or something I can use to fix this because it is a massive frustration for me.
That’s just you taking a guess.
The possible size of the buffer is heavily depending on the player hardware. You can consider the available RAM on the “smart TV” platform to be rather on the “small” size. So creating a large buffer is often not possible.
Plex takes the size of the buffer into consideration. And it is performing a detailed bandwidth analysis which determines the actual bandwidth to stream a certain file for different buffer sizes.
You can see these numbers if you inspect the Plex XML info of the movie. Look out for the requiredBandwidths property.
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