What I mean that in this case, that the network is not necessarily the limiting factor. But rather the playback device. If the stick had a larger buffer (just a part of its RAM, where it can store received data packets), the stuttering might not occur.
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That will get you started and here’s a hot tip:
Use 2 pass encoding if you’re ‘bit rate starving’. ‘Starved’ means different things to different people. Basically you can start with my settings and then adjust until your eyeballs are happy.
If you use 3750kbps HB will really try to keep the average in that window, but figure the hole it fits in more like 4500kbps for a good margin of error.
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oh wow, thanks man thats another solid post, will try it out tomorrow! would be really good to know how Netflix/Hulu encode their movies/shows but im guessing theyre more reliant on their high performance/bandwidth servers? i wouldnt say i was bitrate starved (if im correct in what that means lol) because plex as a home media server doesnt give me any issues really but my upload speed is limited to 20mbps so i need to pay more attention to if i were remote streaming.
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Of course, Netflix and other streaming services have the advantage of several pre-transcoded versions with different bitrates, among which the clients can switch seamlessly.
If you invest more computing power/time into the encode, then you can produce very efficient files with a great quality/byte ratio.
Which is something I really wish Plex would integrate… I have no problems keeping a 480, 720, 1080, and 4K copy in the same folder, as long as Plex would intelligently switch between them
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For me a 720P and 1080P would be cool, in the future 4K maybe.
well, the thing that really baffles me is that almost no one is using one of the best features of the matroska container, the ability to have multiple video streams in a single container, which means you only need a single audio track and single subtitle track (provided they’re all the same cut of the movie) to play the same movie in as many different resolutions as you can throw in there… it’s really convenient, and something plex could utilize, but at the moment, they don’t do matroska with multiple video streams 
This would pretty much mean no Direct Play anymore, because you cannot send the file as-is to the clients. You’ll always have to extract the desired video stream beforehand.
Sure, but a demux and remux is still considered DirectStream, right?
Of course. But the best of all cases won’t occur anymore. (which, for instance allows clients to play audio or subtitle streams which even Plex cannot decode, like some of the High-res surround formats).
I get it, there’s likely a way around it somewhere, but regardless, having it switch between multiple individual files rather than streams inside a matroska file would still be better than where we’re at now 
Sorry for jumping in. I couldn’t tell from the posts but are you referring to a files bitrate offer the bandwidth of the stream at it travels through your network?
If the former, that’s been discussed above. If the latter, plex does not control this unless you specify the upload limit in PMS. Otherwise, the bandwidth will be whatever your network allows.
It doesn’t show who you were replying to with that question… Was it me?
Sorry, i was asking the op.
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I understand what my network limitations are and i have already set those in accordance to my upload/download speeds if thats what you’re asking? i was referring to the bit rate(s).
How’d you do that?
How are you determining that it is streaming at 35 Mbps?
Well i thought i was encoding my media in accordance to my network capabilities which was to observe the ‘overall bitrate’ but as we’ve progressed we’ve established that i was wrong…
Thats what i thought was happening but now i understand that they were spiking… The first image i posted with the bandwidth monitor helped me understand that i was wrong in thinking plex was streaming at a constant 35mbps…
