@Antiproton said:
What kind of determinations are being made before deciding to adjust “auto quality”, specifically with respect to a server on the same local network as the client?
I’m watching an admittedly poor copy of a show. It’s 350MB, AVI, SD, 1149kbps. For reasons that I cannot begin to imagine, the server/client adjusted the quality down to 0.2Mbps, rendering the video essentially Minecraft Vision.
I have a gigabit network, and my PC is connected via ethernet. The server is physically located about a foot and a half away from the PC. The server is an AMD FX 8350 with 16GB of RAM. There are two other streams running - H264 1080p movies that PlexPy reports are transcoding to 1280x540 for Roku. Not exactly busting a gut.
Why, on earth, would the server decide to adjust my stream downward?
There is entirely too much black box these days. I’m getting tired of having to scour Google for answers to whatever crazy new behavior resulted from a feature that’s supposed to make life better but just makes administering the server an additional hassle. Come on guys.
@Antiproton said:
What kind of determinations are being made before deciding to adjust “auto quality”, specifically with respect to a server on the same local network as the client?
The only thing PMS does is check the throughput. If it can’t maintain a steady stream, it lowers the quality to the detected level. The cause for the slowness could be:
slow transcoder
slow reading of input file
network issue
client issue
There’s no way to know for sure without looking into your logs.
@“alicaaliya022@gmail.com” said:
I hate auto quality, I use a fairly old laptop on a very fast connection so all the videos want to play in >720p60fps which makes said laptop sound like a fighter jet and hot like the sun. So fun to turn down the quality on every video in a playlist
Just Direct Play them at Original Quality to avoid transcoding and the subsequent fighter jet. But FWIW, I totally sympathise with you as my PC, although very powerful, looks as though it was built by the Borg and has more fans than Man Utd!!
This is an excellent feature to have, especially since they revoked the Net Neutrality laws. I have it on Netflix and always hoped Plex would get it too.
Some minor issue(s) that it still has on iOS:
Even though I chose to default to “original quality” as my starting point, I often find the quality setting at something higher than the original quality of the video, forcing the server to convert and using more bandwidth than the original video had.
You might want to suppress “you don’t have enough bandwidth” messages at the start of playback or cache for a little longer before beginning playback. I noticed I get false “you don’t have enough bandwidth” messages - typically only at the beginning of a video.
I often receive the message that the server is not powerful enough to convert the video. This often happens when it tries (on its own) to play at a higher than the original quality. Regardless, you might want to extend the concept of auto-adjusting/lowering the quality to those that the server can handle.
As I said, these are MINOR issues. The feature is great even with these problems. I do hope you address these minor issues, but I would not call them feature-breaking.
I have 50 or so different users, and every single time a user gets on a new device it defaults to “convert automatically”. This puts EVERYONE to the lowest (SD) quality every time. So in my environment it just… doesnt work.
@dirtycajunrice said:
I have 50 or so different users, and every single time a user gets on a new device it defaults to “convert automatically”. This puts EVERYONE to the lowest (SD) quality every time. So in my environment it just… doesnt work.
Maybe - and this is just a thought - but have you suggested that they get their own Plex Cloud account instead of clogging up the system for everyone else!!
If you have 50 users connected to your account then I have absolutely no sympathy for you whatsoever!!
@BigStevie1973 haha, its not a clog issue. I have Gigabit Symmetrical, CPU GHz for days and 160TB of storage. There is no limitation on the server or resources, its just the client. Its become ritual to explain to them how to set their quality to Original or 1080p 20Mbps per device.
As for the 50 users, there is a 100 friend limit for a reason. No sympathy needed! XD. My prior post is solely on the testing usability, or lack thereof, of the Auto Quality feature.
@BigStevie1973 direct play is actually terrible when you have multiple users outside your network, I had to stop letting my internet users direct play because 1 episode of a series can get up to 30MPs and max out my internet, I only allow direct stream now because my CPU is strong enough for 4 transcoding at one time. but my upload bandwidth is my bottleneck at 33 MB/s
@Mini_Server said: @BigStevie1973 direct play is actually terrible when you have multiple users outside your network, I had to stop letting my internet users direct play because 1 episode of a series can get up to 30MPs and max out my internet, I only allow direct stream now because my CPU is strong enough for 4 transcoding at one time. but my upload bandwidth is my bottleneck at 33 MB/s
Nothing is terrible and nothing is perfect. Direct play is by far the best solution if you prepare your files with the right bitrate beforehand…
Edit: talking about direct play/direct stream/transcoding, obviously. A bunch of things about Plex are terrible.
@KarlDag There are a lot of really cool features as well, they have too many platforms to support which takes away from the QC of the features. Im in love with the new Tautulli functionality, wish it came standard with plex.
All I want is to have a clear and concise settings for all these options, its hard to get a general feel what works and what is still working.
auto quality is in beta I havent seen it work or have issues, but again Im not one of the users.
@Mini_Server said: @BigStevie1973 direct play is actually terrible when you have multiple users outside your network, I had to stop letting my internet users direct play because 1 episode of a series can get up to 30MPs and max out my internet, I only allow direct stream now because my CPU is strong enough for 4 transcoding at one time. but my upload bandwidth is my bottleneck at 33 MB/s
When you’re using Plex Cloud it doesn’t affect your own bandwidth.
@Mini_Server said: @BigStevie1973 direct play is actually terrible when you have multiple users outside your network, I had to stop letting my internet users direct play because 1 episode of a series can get up to 30MPs and max out my internet, I only allow direct stream now because my CPU is strong enough for 4 transcoding at one time. but my upload bandwidth is my bottleneck at 33 MB/s
When you’re using Plex Cloud it doesn’t affect your own bandwidth.
Nor when you are using a VPS in the Cloud for your PMS. It’s crazy to be compromising your network bandwidth by serving up media to your friends & family that needs to be degraded by transcoding when you could be running a VPS & allow them to Direct Play full quality.
I have tested this extensively since release and I have to say that it is very impressive. It is especially useful for when I have to travel for work and end up in random hotel rooms around the world with shoddy internet connections. I can usually end up watching what I wanted to and am really impressed with the seamless transitions between different transcoding profiles.
One thing that I do notice though, If I have, say about 1.5Mps of bandwidth available on the hotel wifi, plex will transcode to the maximum available bandwidth that is available. The net result is that it does this at the expense of all other traffic.
If i want to read and email or browse the web while a video is playing, I can´t because plex is using every bit of available bandwidth.
As a workaround, I check to see what the current bit rate is and then manually set something lower. This is however, fixed at that lower rate and will not increase should more bandwidth become available.
It would be very useful to be able to set a maximum threshold so that plex never transcodes to a bit rate that uses all of the bandwidth and only uses say 85% of what is available.
@“abedathman8@gmail.com” said:
I’ve downloaded this extension and selected both the “highres” and “4k” options. Neither work, 4k videos still automatically play at 1080p. Have I just misunderstood what this app does? I want youtube to automatically play videos in the highest resolution available whether it’s 4k or 360p. Is this even possible?
I think you may have misunderstood as this is Plex not YouTube!! :s
Hello All,
I know this thread is old, but I haven’t seen an update from the Plex team in a while discussing when this will be out of beta.
I recently upgraded my connection to 1Gig and notice that most clients are streaming at 4Mbps which is the default for “remote quality.”
A lot of my users are family who aren’t techy enough to mess with this setting even if their bandwidth can support higher bitrates.
I’m hoping this is close to being out of Beta and pushes that setting to Auto for their sake.
i know you don’t give ETA’s, but trust me, this is the most needed feature of all.
This needs to come out of beta and be activated by default, while truly working without bugs (like chosing extrem low res without reason a while ago).
Simply every single one i share my Server with, is expecting it to “just work” - in a “Netflix-World”. None of them goes through the settings to see streams maxed out for 4mbps by default. Again - its a Netflix-World.
And i’m ending up telling them, often for every single client (omg), to adjust their settings where ever they are. And they are like “WTF?”… for good reason
