What is the best quality to set at or maximum quality to set at remote

[ng4ever 40]

Like 4g lte/5g for example ?

Does it depend on the video file size ?

 

 

[pwhodges 2012]

It depends on the transfer rate you are getting at the place you intend to watch - which might be limited by signal strength, or by throttling of the speed in the network feeding the transmitter.  You can get speed-test apps to try to determine your likely speed.

It does not depend on the file size, though.

Paul

[Happy2Play 9780]

There is no true answer as 4G/LTE/5G network speeds will fluctuate depending on usage.  Time of day network saturation makes a difference also on my 4G/LTE connections.

[ng4ever 40]

So how do you prevent buffering or stopping of video then please? 

[Happy2Play 9780]

All you can do on a network that is not consistent is manually adjust quality.  If you know you are on a network with a constant speed then you can attempt to set a max value.

That is why online services have multiple resolutions to give you that lower quality version on the slow connection. 

[ng4ever 40]

8 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

All you can do on a network that is not consistent is manually adjust quality.  If you know you are on a network with a constant speed then you can attempt to set a max value.

That is why online services have multiple resolutions to give you that lower quality version on the slow connection. 

Thanks that sucks that it is a guessing game  

Don’t some online services adjust constantly for you? 

[Happy2Play 9780]

10 minutes ago, ng4ever said:

Thanks that sucks that it is a guessing game  

Don’t some online services adjust constantly for you? 

Yes it is a guessing game as no network is the same.  Just like the hospital network could limit/throttle your wifi speed to 1Mbps and your home wifi can be 100Mbps.

Yes I believe online services can change between qualities during playback.

[ng4ever 40]

1 minute ago, Happy2Play said:

Yes it is a guessing game as no network is the same.  Just like the hospital network could limit/throttle your wifi speed to 1Mbps and your home wifi can be 100Mbps.

Yes I believe online services can change between qualities during playback.

Why can’t Emby yet change between qualities during playback please? 

[Happy2Play 9780]

1 minute ago, ng4ever said:

Why can’t Emby yet change between qualities during playback please? 

Only devs can answer that but it obviously is not as easy as is sounds with your home server.

But that question has two different answers depending on whether you are talking about Transcoding or Direct Play per the adaptive streaming topic you have already commented in.

Online services could bounce between dozens of versions to give you adaptive quality.  You will not likely have dozens of versions on your media server.

[ng4ever 40]

10 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Only devs can answer that but it obviously is not as easy as is sounds with your home server.

But that question has two different answers depending on whether you are talking about Transcoding or Direct Play per the adaptive streaming topic you have already commented in.

Online services could bounce between dozens of versions to give you adaptive quality.  You will not likely have dozens of versions on your media server.

Is it possible with transcoding ?

[pwhodges 2012]

2 hours ago, ng4ever said:

Is it possible with transcoding ?

It could be done in principle, but it would it would be very difficult. Starting from the present transcoding scheme it would have problems and not be very responsive, as any adjustment to the transcoding parameters would be delayed by the amount of buffering in use - which is generally considerable (as in: Emby by default transcodes the whole video as fast as it can rather than "just in time", as I understand it).

Paul

[ng4ever 40]

3 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

It could be done in principle, but it would it would be very difficult. Starting from the present transcoding scheme it would have problems and not be very responsive, as any adjustment to the transcoding parameters would be delayed by the amount of buffering in use - which is generally considerable (as in: Emby by default transcodes the whole video as fast as it can rather than "just in time", as I understand it).

Paul

 

Thanks.

 

I wish instead there was a way for Emby to stop buffering or constantly buffer, download the media in advance while it is playing so if the network (4g lte/5g) does slow down there is no buffering sense it has a extra amount of time to speed back up.

Does that make sense ?

That way it would not have to go up and down in quality.

Edited October 31, 2021 by ng4ever

[ng4ever 40]

I am not even sure if that is possible

Hope so.

 

[pwhodges 2012]

There is already some buffering within the app as part of its normal operation, but the amount is presumably chosen to limit the impact on the phone's resources.  Also, if you want a lot of pre-buffering you would need to wait for it, and then that is more nearly equivalent to downloading the whole video in advance - which is already an option, and removes the requirement for a specific download speed at the expense of having to wait for as long as it take to download (which might be a long time, of course).

Paul

[ng4ever 40]

Just now, pwhodges said:

There is already some buffering within the app as part of its normal operation, but the amount is presumably chosen to limit the impact on the phone's resources.  Also, if you want a lot of pre-buffering you would need to wait for it, and then that is more nearly equivalent to downloading the whole video in advance - which is already an option, and removes the requirement for a specific download speed at the expense of having to wait for as long as it take to download (which might be a long time, of course).

Paul

That sucks.

Guess that is no easy way to fix it

I wish there was.

Do you think once real 5g is mostly everywhere or 90% of places it will help improve the situration by 2023 or 2024 ?

 

[Happy2Play 9780]

Just now, ng4ever said:

That sucks.

Guess that is no easy way to fix it

I wish there was.

Do you think once real 5g is mostly everywhere or 90% of places it will help improve the situration by 2023 or 2024 ?

 

Yes 5g may make a difference but at the same time will get just as saturated when everyone is doing the same thing as providers will always be throttling traffic.

[ng4ever 40]

Just now, Happy2Play said:

Yes 5g may make a difference but at the same time will get just as saturated when everyone is doing the same thing as providers will always be throttling traffic.

[ng4ever 40]

There has to be a way to fix it so it works as well as a hard line like fiber or whatever cable modem connection.

[rodainas 191]

2 minutes ago, ng4ever said:

There has to be a way to fix it so it works as well as a hard line like fiber or whatever cable modem connection.

The place where you have some control is with the bitrate of the media, trying to maintain some reasonable max bitrate will help with the things you cant control like mobile internet speed. 

[Happy2Play 9780]

From my AT&T LTE network connection I get from 0.5Mbps to about 6Mbps depending on the time of day.  So there is no way to set a value that would work all the time.

[ng4ever 40]

15 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

From my AT&T LTE network connection I get from 0.5Mbps to about 6Mbps depending on the time of day.  So there is no way to set a value that would work all the time.

Same here mostly.

 

P.S. / off topic is the server for the forum acting up or id someone trying to prevent me from replying ? Lol

[ng4ever 40]

39 minutes ago, rodainas said:

The place where you have some control is with the bitrate of the media, trying to maintain some reasonable max bitrate will help with the things you cant control like mobile internet speed. 

Yes but how will that help 100% ?

 

[pwhodges 2012]

11 hours ago, ng4ever said:

There has to be a way to fix it so it works as well as a hard line like fiber or whatever cable modem connection.

Sure, with essentially infinite resources, and a mast within 600 yards of every person in the world...

Paul

[rodainas 191]

12 hours ago, ng4ever said:

Yes but how will that help 100% ?

 

Nothing will help at 100%, it was just a suggestion to get the best of it.

[Carlo 4561]

17 hours ago, ng4ever said:

Why can’t Emby yet change between qualities during playback please? 

The way big video services work to handle this is by having multiple versions of the same media.  For example a Movie you stream from Netflix typically will have around 12 different versions of the same movie pre transcoded and ready to use. That's for one format like AVC.  They may have another set of files for HEVC as well and use these when possible to save bandwidth which is a primary concern for them.

They also take great care in the production of these files.  For example you won't have graphics subs available to use or they would have been burned in and ready to use.  You won't have multiple subs, multiple audio files as part of the media because each of those is it's own file.

So as you can see the servers do no processing of the media but simply stream it!

What happens during playback is the client selects the correct playback set based on language and other criteria as well as what it thinks should be the starting bandwidth. The server then sends back the proper HLS manifest (pre-prepared) with different streams in it.  Each of those streams will have the different bandwidth versions available.

The player will start by using the version it thinks is best and then according to how full it can keep the buffer along with dropped frames and other things it looks at during playback will/can fall back to a lower bitrate version or select a higher bitrate version and do this as it plays dynamically changing the bitrate as it goes. Technically it's just switching the stream used for playback.

The above is actually very easy to do.  Now compare that to what Emby has to do when there is one file available to use which can have 20 subtitles embedded and maybe 10 audio tracks using codecs that aren't playable by the client.  The bitrate of the video or audio may also be a lot higher then what the client can handle.  The subtitles available might not be usable by the client and Emby has to burn them in as it goes.  Emby has to be a lot more sophisticated then the "dumb" servers used by Netflix.

Not only does Emby has a ton more work to do at times then simply streaming a file it also has to deal with a world of different server environments to handle transcoding when needed. Is it software only or hardware transcode?  What kind of CPU and what does it support? If hardware what brand and what does it support?

It's possible in the future that Emby could use "fake" stream data in the manifest sent to clients and allow them to fluctuate the stream picked during playback just as what happens with Netflix and others but then Emby has to be able to react to the change request of streams the client made and change how the file is being transcoded on the fly.  This is not easy to do and can result in pauses as Emby needs to start the transcode from scratch and build up a tiny buffer on the server before it can send it to the client. Not only that but Emby often has to "fix" or handle bad header information in the media on the fly when transcoding for things like bad timing info.  If this information is not absolutely perfect you have little chance of switching transcoding parameters on the fly without a jump in scenes or other problems.

Also keep in mind any type of "on-the-fly" adjustments would require all media be transcoded so it's under the transcoder's control.  That means you would not be able to start with a direct stream and switch dynamically.

While not a replacement for the above, it would likely be far easier to have Emby transcode to HEVC when possible (hardware encoders) which typically is far more bandwidth friendly. That alone would/could make playback easier and more reliable on mobile platforms with limited bandwidth. Switching to HEVC itself is no picnic either and has it's own set of issues for the team to address but would likely be far easier and help in many ways.

So hopefully that gives you a little bit of info to understand how this work in general and all the obstacles that Emby would have to deal with in order to do this.