Hello,
My initial Situation:
upload Speed: ca 10mbits.
In PMS limited to 8mbits.
My Clients Settings are one 2mbits (FireTV) and two 3mbits (Samsung TV)
So what is the best way to do it?
Like I did.
Set PMS upload Speed to 10mbits and no remote Limit? Clients Settings fix to 2mbits and two 3mbits?
In PMS no upload Speed but remote limited to lets say 3mbits and Clients set to No Limit?
Upload Speed to 10mbits and remote to 8mbits. and all three Clients no Limit, so that they hopefully share bandwidth together when all three are Streaming?
I guess there are more Options to mix Things up here!?
How many streams do you anticipate at the same time?
What bit rate does most of the material you’ll share possess?
Will any of your material fit into the upload bandwidth at the server?
Will most of it?
Will the remote clients be able to Direct Play the material you provide?
Ideally - remote clients should Direct Play material, if possible, to keep the transcoding load down on the server - that ultimately makes nobody happy.
If the material you’re sharing doesn’t fit into the server’s upload bandwidth, or can’t be Direct Played on the client devices - you need to figure out how many ‘Transcodes’ you can provide simultaneously. That’s the real question.
Whatever you do - you have 8mbps upload to work with - on a good day.
If ANY of your material’s ‘Average Bit Rate’ exceeds, say 2500kpbs, figure on a transcode as peak rates could easily go into 8 (unless constrained in the encode). Plex will know that in it’s inspection of bandwidth and material and force a transcode.
If that happens a lot - you need to find out how many of those transcodes you can do at the same time.
IF - you determine a transcode is most likely for Remote Clients, you should set them all to 720p @ 2Mbps and enable ‘Auto Quality’ or ‘Adjust Automatically’ or whatever Plex is calling it in that app (Roku doesn’t have it - yet), because as conditions change during a stream the stream will adapt and keep going instead of failing entirely in buffer.
It may look pretty bad if it really tanks, but at least it’ll keep going.
