[Preview] Try the new Auto Quality feature! Now on Web, Android, & iOS

General Discussions
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Cross-post from General Discussions (Public) to make sure that our Plex Pass users get to see this

We don’t always live in a world with consistent home Wi-Fi or Internet speeds. Maybe the cellular signal varies during the bus ride into work, or your Wi-Fi slows down every time your roommate microwaves a burrito. When your connection quality changes, it’s annoying for video players to pause or require you to change a quality setting. In cases like that, it’s ideal to automatically adapt without interruptions.

To give you the best possible experience, Plex can now automatically adjust the quality of your video based on your connection speed. When auto quality is turned on, videos will start at the quality that you have selected in your app’s quality settings, then increase or decrease quality based on your connection speed.

Where can I try auto quality?

This feature is starting as a Plex Pass preview available for our Android (mobile), iOS, and Apple TV apps. To try the preview, you’ll need:

Plex apps that support the new Automatically Adjust Quality setting:

  • Plex Web (3.20.4 or later)
  • Plex for Android mobile (5.10 or later)
  • Plex for iOS (4.10 or later)
  • Plex for Apple TV (1.11 or later)
  • (Auto quality is coming soon to Plex apps on other TVs, streaming devices, and the web.)

In coming weeks, auto quality will become available to all non-Plex Pass users and other Plex apps. Each app needs to be tuned and tested to make sure that we provide a smooth experience with auto quality. We know that your portable devices can have inconsistent Internet connections when you’re on the go, so we started with the mobile apps.

Problems?

This feature is starting as a preview to help us identify any problems early on. If you experience problems with auto quality, we want to know about it. Please post your issue report to the Plex forum for your app.

In particular, please report any issues with playback stalling or pausing, video corruption, or audio problems. It’s also helpful for you to confirm that the issue only occurs when Automatically Adjust Quality is turned on.

Learn more

To learn more about the auto quality feature and how to use it, visit our new help article about Automatically Adjust Quality.

For our advanced users, the article also includes technical details such as bit rate ranges, transcoding implications, and advanced configuration.

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Cool feature! Looking forward to trying it out.

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Still no real buffer for listening music though 3G/4G connection :frowning:

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@vincen said:
Still no real buffer for listening music though 3G/4G connection :frowning:

That’s not what this feature is.

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Given that PMS trips even on a gigabit network and a 2 Mbps media from time to time, I see a “bright” future for my experience if this becomes enabled by default.
I just pray I am totally wrong and this feature will work like a dream.

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I’m not sure where the bottleneck was with this. I think Plex was trying to convert a stream to a higher quality than the original video because it was in the home network and it would buffer like crazy. I just got a brand new, blazing fast computer, and it wasn’t breaking a sweat with the transcoding. It could have been that it was streaming to an iPad 2 and the iPad couldn’t handle that high of quality. I don’t know. Even lowering the quality settings to 2 mbps didn’t help. Once I turned off the feature it streamed just fine.

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Can you explain me how i can play always original quality ? Because after version 5.10.X android app always trying transcode when i cast video to chromecast

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Does this not work for Home users? The setting is available in the admin user in android but not for the home users

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There are some serious issues with this feature on tvOS on the Apple TV…so severe that there are many threads in the ATV sub forum with people (myself included) discussing that the only way of fixing the buffering problems it has introduced is by turning it off competely.

I wanted to bring this to the devs attention so they can check out those threads in the forum for more details.

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Certainly an interesting development. As per your narative about earlier cell & internet reliability: I had almost forgot about the occasional analog “dit.dit…dit” sound emitating from amplified pc speakers. One only surmised a neighborhood cel call had been initiated. Was recently watching an older movie recording when low & behold I heard that unmistakable “dit… dit… dit” trapped for eternity in the audio track in an otherwise high-quality recording! A “dit…dit blast” from the past I guess.

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This feature has completely broken Chromecast direct play, everything just transcodes now, way to burn more more electricity Mr Plex. #plexsavetheplanet #savemypocket

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As for chromecast ^… , Might you have had a better experience upon reboot? Just curious if the same.
By the way, I have many renderers in addition to chromecast ie. : Sony Products - BD & Media Players, Amazon Fire and Roku. Is there away to re-enable support for them? They are not available anymore from the drop down cast-to icon.

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@MovieFan.Plex said:

@vincen said:
Still no real buffer for listening music though 3G/4G connection :frowning:

That’s not what this feature is.

So the throttling/boosting of quality is not universally applied to all streams? Do you mean to interrupt that Auto Quality only applies to video at this time? What about internet content (Trailers, extras, Watch later and Channels)?

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Yeah, this feature combined with Chromecast is a disaster. I’m watching a 3Mbps 1080p movie and the autoquality feature sets it to convert 200Mbps 1080p. It’s completely broken, It will never direct play. I’m getting 500+Mbps locally (chromecast ethernet adapter), so bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue. Server is overpowered for that movie (with default plex transcoding settings) so I doubt it has anything to do with processing power either.

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This is quite pointless without hw transcode. Stuck st version 1.6.0 limbo for hw transcode, but automatic quality selection is in this newer version… which would cripple server cpu.

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beacause of this, i can no longer watch a movie in original quality on Nvidia Shield TV. Suddenly it’s trancodig video and DTS HD down to lover quality and DTS only… I have changed and tried every possible combination (even audio quality to off) ith no luck. Please take this stupid thing aways as fast as possible!

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Updated PMS today to 1.8.1 (MacOS), seems that automatic quality doesn’t work anymore (iOS client 4.16.2) … Last time that was working was iOS client 4.16.1 with PMS 1.7.5

Anyone got the same behaviour?

Edit: after some more try seems that bandwidth goes only down but not up: if i set 0.3mbps (240p) it stays like that, if i set 4mbps (720p) it goes down to 2mbps. Plenty of bandwidth (50+ mbps) on both sides, one week ago same content (same phone/client and same bandwidth) scaled from 0,3mbps to 1080p 8mbps in less than 20 seconds

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Oh, ok… so you must change it on the guide here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/115007570148
(Just to clarify, i selected that quality levels on the client, not on the “Limit Remote Stream Bitrate” PMS setting; “Automatically Adjust Quality” does not exclude the manual quality selection for Internet and Home Streaming, which will be the starting quality)

Under “Checking the Auto Quality Level”

With auto quality, your video will begin at the starting quality selected in your app’s Quality settings (under Internet Streaming or Home Streaming). After 20-60 seconds, the video will increase or decrease based on your connection speed. If your connection speed changes later, quality will continue to increase or decrease.

Under “What are the minimum and maximum qualities?”

Auto quality will automatically select streaming qualities between 192 kbps and 20 Mbps.

Quality will always start at the default quality selected for Internet Streaming or Home Streaming in your app settings, then increase or decrease based on connection speed. Auto quality supports a larger number of precise qualities than appear in the list of available manual quality levels.

Thanks for the help!

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New to Plex Pass and I’m rather disappointed with Plex. I want to cast from my Android to a chromecast TV but I’m constantly getting the “…server is not powerful enough to convert…” messages watching local 1080p H264 AC3 mkv files (and others).
My dedicated server is a NUC i5 @1.6GHz with 16gb ram and an SSD.
I have about 65-75Mbps wifi to the Galaxy S5 and I’ve enabled “Automatic Adjust Quality” with default settings.
My server transcoder settings are set to “Automatic”.

I’ve pored through many posts and blog entries but cannot figure out why my server is not powerful enough to play these videos. Now with the auto-quality feature, is there any place that I can find out what all my settings should be to be able to play without failures. How can I find the problem and fix it???

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@simonx Sorry for the confusion. The article is correct. The selected setting is the starting quality.

We’re investigating the regression in 1.8.1-1.8.2 and will have a new release out soon.