Conversion bitrate not honored

[Carlo 4561]

Just have them set every client to max bandwidth and then you have full control from the server for that user.
The only exception would be when the user is on a bad internet connection and needs to lower it themselves.  ie a mobile phone might play back 20Mb files perfectly fine on their home WIFI but at a guest hotspot might be limited to 2Mb.

I too, like many of you think the auto setting doesn't work as expected. At least not the way the admin or user would think it should work.  It's more of an "Economy" bandwidth setting as tries to use the least amount of bandwidth which often makes your server transcode when it didn't need to.

[softworkz 5067]

8 hours ago, Painkiller8818 said:

I would say it is NOT working correctly but the answer in another Thread was, this is like it should be... 

Whoever said that - no, that's not how it should be; it's just like it currently is.

8 hours ago, Painkiller8818 said:

so i just tell all my friends to set the bitrate a bit higher

Accommodating in that way would be not a big deal if that behavior would be consistent.

The unfortunate part of the story is that this behavior is specific to the libx264 encoder.
All hardware accelerated encoders are instead producing video streams that are adhering to the configured bandwidth pretty closely.
Neither clients nor the server admin can control when sw or hw acceleration is used (other than disabling hwa completely), which makes results unpredictable and setting bitrates "a bit higher" an unreliable workaround. The better way is to use everything as intended and reduce the CRF value instead.

 
The CRF mode from libx264 has always been their (libx264's) primary recommended mode for transcoding cases like Emby is doing and we have been using it for years.
Making a change to that, requires intensive testing - both internally and by users - to gather enough experience based on which such a decision could be made.

With the options in the Diagnostics Plugin, I have opened the door to allow user-side testing of a rate-control mode for libx264 that will provide better matching of the desired output bandwidth. Everybody can try it out and feedback is welcome!