Playback Auto mode

[nanohits 18]

How do I get Emby to play for all users in the higher resolution set rather than Auto? Every time a movie in 1080 P only shows up in 480P and my friends say Emby player doesnt play back in good quality and they are not familiar enough to know to change it in settings. Is there any way to force higher quality in the server itself? They are used to Plex where when you first start off it doesnt start off Auto is low quality. I even tried to play and I have a 50Mbit connection and the movie starts playing in 480P.

[Happy2Play 9788]

Sorry all clients by default are set to Auto.  So you have to adjust the clients to appropriate quality.  I personally tell them to set the client to max and throttle them via the servers global or user "Internet streaming bitrate limit (Mbps):"

[nanohits 18]

Thats too bad cause the auto doesnt work, all the Auto does is set it to the lowest quality, giving a bad impression of the player itself

If the auto worked then it is another story.

Edited August 10, 2020 by nanohits

[Happy2Play 9788]

It is a catch 22 as you can not give max quality to multiple users, as normal residential isp does not have very high upload speeds in most areas.  So auto is pretty conservative.  But at the same time it is usually really conservative when the link test fail for some reason.  So without context of the connection quality from point A to point B it is impossible to guess a issue.

So currently the Emby is set up it is more on the User/Client then said personal server.  But there are several topics on Auto and people wanting Auto to deliver max quality vs Auto being conservative or just a misunderstand of the context of Auto.

Edited August 10, 2020 by Happy2Play

[nanohits 18]

Things is I host my file in a data center. So the capacity is there. I guess every user I have to force set it to a min quality of at least 720 in this case as the Auto is just useless as it sets even the high bandwidth to 480.

[Carlo 4561]

There is no minimum setting so 720 is likely not a good choice.  What you really want to do is have the user set the highest rate available they see in the remote setting that works for them.  It will try to default to that all the time once set for each person on each device.  Now once that is set, you can control their quality from your server by adjusting the users bitrate if needed or if you don't have a bandwidth issue allow them to fully use whatever bandwidth is needed.

I too agree the AUTO setting is often far to conservative in what it chooses when transcoding AND doesn't do what the admin or client assumes it will do.