Shield Bitrate Auto vs 100Mb

[solidus28 11]

Hello again!

 

I've typically left my various devices set to Auto for the bitrate.  Today, I tried the toughest video I've tried yet (terrible movie, but amazing video)...Billy Lynn's Halftime Walk.  This is the HDR10 60fps version with Atmos.  It clocks in over 80Mbps bitrate.  I noticed when I attempted to play it on my Shield, it would try to transcode.  My server is super old and has no transcoding ability, so the video basically was just frozen.  I started looking around and noticed on web, I had an option to change from Auto to 120Mbps!  So I went back to the Shield and checked the same options.  I changed it from Auto to 100Mbps and now the video plays Direct flawlessly!

 

So, I have two questions:

 

1.  What does Auto check for?  It appears to me that Auto had me maxed at 80Mbps.  When I view my server logs, I see the message 'Bitrate exceeds DirectStream limit: media bitrate: 91366808, max bitrate: 80000000' when I had it set to Auto, causing the transcoding.

 

2.  Probably totally unnecessary right now, but will higher options be added to Android TV like the web (100Mbps vs 120Mbps)?  Or will Auto be reconfigured to allow the higher bitrates?

 

 

Thanks as usual!

[ebr 14945]

When on the local LAN auto tries to select a reasonable rate that we are pretty sure won't fail on the device.  For the Shield this is 80Mb and, since it is dependent on network connection, i don't really want to go any higher than that.  if you want higher you can do what you did and set it manually.

 

Other devices have lower limits because they simply cannot handle bitrates that high.