I am having quality issues on multiple computers on my home network, both PC’s and Mac’s. I have used Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox and all have the same issue - after crawling these forums multiple times and trying everything I can think of I don’t know what is wrong. I keep thinking it must be something simple, but I cannot find it.
A couple notes:
Quality settings are all set to Maximum for both Internet and Home Streaming on all browsers and Apps.
If I enable DLNA and watch a movie using VLC the quality is what it should be
From the web player, if I click on settings there is not always an option to change video quality
On my laptop the Plex App plays the movies at the right resolution even when the Web doesn’t but my wife’s Mac plays movies low resolution on both the web and the app
My home network has plenty of bandwidth, I have monitored it when playing through the Web, App and VLC and there has never been any instance where bandwidth was an issue
Generally speaking you do not want to use the Plex web client for playback. It’s fine in a pinch and for certain video formats but if you’re playing any high end video or video/audio that is not natively compatible to the web browser, you’re going to see these sort of issues because your Plex media server is trying to transcode into a compatible version for the web browser.
Start by downloading a desktop app or the Plex media player app on your laptops and see where those are working well and report back in situations where they are not. In situations that are not working will you need to post more details about the video itself, the app settings, and the app versions.
Thank you for the quick reply. As mentioned above I have the App on all the computers and while it seems to work ok on my PC it does not fix the problem on my wife’s Mac. The settings in the app have been checked, is there anything else I can tell you?
And last but not least, in the web browser go to the Plex server settings, then navigate to the Plex server dashboard, and take a screenshot of the “now playing“ section during the time that there are issues on your wife’s laptop.
My wife has a MacBook Pro Core i7 3.1GHz 1TB SSD 16GB RAM running the latest macOS, I also updated the Plex app this afternoon so it is the latest that is on the website.
Below is a video that is a fairly small file and not high definition, yet when she plays it the resolution is extremely low through Plex, but when I play through VLC on the same Mac it looks fine.
I need the expanded version of the Now Playing info, there’s a funky squarish icon that toggles that view on/off. It will show some connection/playback details.
Got it, sorry. I didn’t realize that would expand. Here is another movie that was being played tonight. The quality was poor on the App but looked good through VLC, this was on my Windows laptop. As a side note, I am going to uninstall the Plex App and try Plex for Windows to see if that works better.
