Most of my friends use the default settings and do not bother to change their quality settings. Getting them to change it has proven to be impossible. It is ridiculous that they are watching videos in 720p 2Mbps on a 55+" TV when their connection is perfectly capable of streaming 1080p or even 4K. I’m not even worried about CPU performance, I just want everyone to have the best experience possible. I have set up an emby server where auto quality works flawlessly by default and I am seriously considering moving entirely to emby over this. Please make it the default option already - nobody should be watching videos in 720p in (almost) 2020, when their connection allows for better.
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If there is a God - or a Plex Developer with a working brain - NEVER!
You can still disable auto quality if you don’t like it. I presume you are not using the current default (720p 2 Mbps), so you changed that setting at least once. Most people do not bother even checking the quality settings and “auto”.
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Would you care to explain why you think 720p 2Mbps is the better option?
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The default ‘Remote Quality’ setting is 720 @ 4Mbps - about 2Mbps too high, but the point is ‘Auto Quality’ is one of most epic Plex Fails to ever be realized by it’s hapless users.
Yes, it’s kinda a PITA to have to communicate with a remote user to have them change the Remote Quality Setting in their app to better suit the material they’re trying to watch (and Plex is transcoding for no reason - other than an errant setting), but getting them to change that setting is WAY BETTER than having Plex force it’s decision on everyone.
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Yep.
…and furthermore The Space Shuttle could have landed itself if the wings where still on it and all the crew where dead, but Plex is NOT The Space Shuttle.
There are some things administrators need to administrate when they’re running a server and that’s one of them.
What wouldn’t be bad would be if I, as an administrator, could FORCE the Remote Quality setting on any remote app that’s connected to my server - negating the need for me to try to talk Aunt Gladys through the ‘Remote Quality’ setting routine. <—I’d go for that.
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Thats a total of all remote. Not just one user.
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Right, but it won’t change Remote Quality to 1080 @ 8Mbps - that better suits my material. 720 @ 4 on their end means that no matter what I do on my end a transcode is going to happen.
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That’s right. I don’t love having to talk Aunt Gladys through the process - other than spending that ‘Quality Time’ with her - but it’s better than trying to work out a technical issue with a 103 year old woman some 600 miles distant…that neither one of us have any control over…lol
Here’s a question… Has anyone contemplated on how Netflix “dynamically” adjusts the content until it can give you as best as the client can handle?
I’ve always found that rather impressive!
Surely there is more to it than that! Is the content ALWAYS being transcoded at the server end?
Hmmmm… if it were that simple, then that begs the question… Why haven’t Plex done something similar?
I think Netflix/Prime/Other just have a whole bunch of different encodes to use and they pick the one they think will work the best - who knows really?
Do they encode everything real time for each user? I doubt it, but could be. Netflix may have the horsepower to do things like that.
‘Adaptive Streaming’ may be ‘creative throttling’ - we also don’t know how that works.
Yes and no… Plex looks at the entire environment at that moment in time, internet speeds at both ends, client capabilities etc, then starts a transcode and then that is that… That quality is then adhered to until the stream stops, then its back to the drawing board.
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They may have the horsepower to do this now, but certainly couldn’t have in the early days.
I know that Plex as a company is obviously significantly smaller than those giants, but often I wonder if they are missing out on various technologies as a result.
Anyways, my Nightwish BluRay has turned up, so time for me to RIP and hammer the hell outta my 7.1 
That’s currently only EAC3 with embedded Atmos. Indeed I agree they are not dealing with DTS-HD or TrueHD codecs.
Actually, one last thing…
I have also often had to guide users through changing their quality settings to ensure they get the best experience possible, and certainly do find that annoying, however the only way I see to resolve that is for a similar “Dynamic” streaming to be developed… Hence my question…
Anyways… NIGHTWISH!!
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Wait, are you aware of the “Auto Quality” feature I’m referring to? It is very similar to the way Netflix handles it and has been in beta for more than two years: https://support.plex.tv/articles/115007570148-automatically-adjust-quality-when-streaming/
That blog post even states that they plan to make it the default option.
From my experience the feature works really well and it is time to take it out of beta. The only thing that annoys me is that it cannot automatically switch from transcoding to direct streaming and vice versa, but only adjust resolution and bitrate, but I can live with that.
