Auto Quality. How does it work?

[iamspartacus 40]

Can someone explain how the streaming quality/speed is determined in the Roku app when the video quality is set to auto? I have no bandwidth or transcoding limitations set on my server but I'm often seeing very poor streaming quality being used for my Roku clients. This is from clients with plenty of dowoad bandwidth (50+Mbps).

 

I'm also not seeing embedded subtitles displayed on some movies (SRTs).

[Jdiesel 1114]

If you look in your server logs you will likely see something like this:

 

2017-09-28 13:16:41.336 Info HttpServer: HTTP GET https://*******.***:443/emby/Playback/BitrateTest?Size=1000000. UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.78 Safari/537.36

 

 

I assume it uses the time to download a test file to determine the bandwidth. I have never had it work correctly for me on any of my clients as it always selects a quality less than 1Mbps even though my network is cable of playing a 30Mbps+ video no problem if I selected that quality manually. My sever is on an external network so I can't comment on how it works on a local network. It is a setting that I do not use.

[iamspartacus 40]

If you look in your server logs you will likely see something like this:

2017-09-28 13:16:41.336 Info HttpServer: HTTP GET https://*******.***:443/emby/Playback/BitrateTest?Size=1000000. UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.78 Safari/537.36

I assume it uses the time to download a test file to determine the bandwidth. I have never had it work correctly for me on any of my clients as it always selects a quality less than 1Mbps even though my network is cable of playing a 30Mbps+ video no problem if I selected that quality manually. My sever is on an external network so I can't comment on how it works on a local network. It is a setting that I do not use.

Yea thus is what I'm seeing. I'm going to need to tell my users with Rokus to set the quality higher.

[Jdiesel 1114]

I figure the latency of the network causes the auto setting to be overly conservative with its selection.