Toggle option to Transcode or Original Quality on the Fly!

This is available with Emby and is a must-have for Channels DVR. 9 out of 10 times I want to watch content in Original Quality, however sometimes a Transcode is required. Let me give you a couple reasons.

  1. HEVC incompatibility with some devices. When watching some HEVC movies (not all), the video spits and stutters with some devices (Tivo Stream 4K, onn 4K Streaming box, Fire & Onn TV's, etc).

  2. 4K Events - A person is mobile, on a 5" cell phone, and they choose to watch a basketball game for example (FS1) and the default is Original Quality. The Bitrate might be 20 or 30Mb and that can cause a lot of people issues with data caps, spitting, stuttering, not to mention just not necessary for a 5" screen.

In these situations (or for other reasons not mentioned) during playback, you simply need to be able to click the 3 dots then have a Playback Quality option to click on then from there you would choose the Transcode Quality from a list. This would only effect this one instance. When you play something next time it keeps your default setting.

This would work in reverse too. If you have 2Mb transcode set by default, you could go in and select Max or Original Quality and it will send it out in Original Quality instead of Transcoding.

This is what it looks like in Emby for reference. When watching something you simply click the gear then hit Quality.


What I am begging for is having a Quality/Playback option listed here in Channels DVR.

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Trying to get more context on this...

Why is a person on a cell phone on mobile ever having Original Quality set for remote streaming?

We want to make sure there isn't more we can be doing to make smarter decisions so you don't have to fidget (and for people who won't know how to fidget).

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9 out of 10 times when watching on the cell phone it's local OTA (ATSC3). This is a minimal 2-5Mb stream. Or if watching a movie it's a 2Mb HEVC stream. I appreciate the higher quality from Original Quality and more importantly the little or no CPU hit from transcoding. Not going to gain much, if any, by transcoding "most" of the time for me...

Sorry, mis understood what you meant by on the fly transcoding. so deleted my post.
Yea. a option to toggle things during playback would be nice, for those who remotely live stream.
I do not. Had always just assumed it had that option already. lol

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Cause they pay up the arzz for a Unlimited Mobile data plan, and want to stream the best quality video?
Because they have a large screen phone (or tablet even) and can notice the difference, consider how large a screen those folding phones open up into.

The biggest thing to gain is “set and forget”. We put a lot of effort into the transcoding engine on the client and the server to do the best trade-off between quality and pleasant experience (no buffering). For instance, if the source material is H.264 at a bitrate that is already lower than what is requested on the client, it will not be transcoded at all.

We haven’t run VMAF tests between Original and 8mbps for OTA, but just looking visually at what you get, I’ve found the video coming straight off the tower to be compressed so much already that the 8mbps transcode is not adding any noticeable degradation in quality.

This doesn't touch the fact that some files simply do not play back smoothly (unwatchable) without any Transcoding on some (lots) of devices. So arguing against giving the customer the option to go in and being able to select the ability to Transcode if they would like to doesn't really make a lot of sense imo.

Do you have an example of one of these HEVC videos that won't work on Android? It's possible we can also handle that better automatically.

Sure would you like me to zip and send to Google Drive?

Please upload a sample to our Dropbox

@eric
Just sent you 3 test files. This is just a small sample. Even if you were able to come up with a fix for playing these smoothly on my Tivo Stream 4K's and Fire TV's (which would be great), I feel the need to be able to choose to Transcode (or Direct Play) at any random time is a must. Just the other day I was at a Hotel and the cell service/wifi sucked. I couldn't Direct Play a 5Mb file. I switched over to Emby and set transcode to 2Mb and it played perfectly!

Edit: 1 of those also doesn't play back smoothly on my Pixel 7 Pro. Super choppy just like on the ATV's abd Fire TV's.

Hi @eric did you get a chance to check out the files?

Another example of when it's needed is when playing back my local ATSC3 Fox station. Out of all the ATSC3 stations, it's the only one that doesn't playback smoothly. It's 720p60. Others are 1080p30 if that matters. I rarely watch it but when I do would like to hit Transcode for it so it plays back smoothly!