Adjust transcoding bitrate

[amitjethani]

Love the ability to set a transcode profile based on client. However, I request a further enhancement where the server admin can specify the bitrate as well as 128 kbps is on the lower side of what I would prefer. Ideally this is a configuration variable that can be specified as a Docker environment variable or can be adjusted directly on the management page.

[sentriz]

thats a cool idea. the meantime though, maybe it could be nice to just provide more presets, other than the 4 we have now? what sort of bitrates etc would you want to see?

[amitjethani]

That would work just as well! I'm drawing some inspiration from a popular music app's settings panel, but here is one idea for presets:

• 64 kbps (for bandwidth constrained/audiobooks)
• 160 kbps
• 320 kbps
• lossless (no transcoding)

[spijet]

Unfortunately, Subsonic API doesn't provide a way to "say" the server that you want to stream something without transcoding, IIRC. It does provide a /download endpoint though (which will give you the requested track exactly as it's stored on the server), but I'm not sure if it's supposed to send the data the same way as /stream in terms of suitability for (near) real-time streaming.

As for custom bitrates: current transcoding implementation allows you (the client) to specify your desired bitrate. See the this iSub screenshot for example.

If your client app sends the desired bitrate as a request parameter, and if it's lower than source track's bitrate, it'll be transcoded to the bitrate your app requested:

	case opts.PreferredBitrate != 0 && opts.PreferredBitrate < opts.TrackBitrate:
		profile.Bitrate = opts.PreferredBitrate
		log.Printf("transcoding according to client request of %dk \n", profile.Bitrate)

[sjmonson]

Airsonic (and I would assume Subsonic) seems to support clients specifying format=raw to get and un-transcoded stream. The play:Sub client uses it if you specify an unlimited bitrate.

In the API documentation:

[sentriz]

gonna close in favour of #244