I believe it would be beneficial to server operators and users to allow users to select preferred video and audio codecs to have media transcoded to. Some devices do this pretty well automatically, but some fail to.
Example: Most Samsung Smart TVs can work with HEVC and EAC3, DTS, and a lot of modern codecs, but they cannot pass anything but PCM and AC3 over HDMI to some receivers. Solution: Allow client setting on initial setup or in settings to prefer transcoding to H264 and AC3.
Example: Xbox App - Xbox can play 264/265/DTS/DTS-HD, but cannot pass most modern codec audio over HDMI outside of the licensed BluRay player. So, allowing users to request server transcode down to AC3 or uncompressed/PCM 5.1 via preferred setting or choice on the media would work around this concern,
Symptom seems to be that Plex sees device capable of playing a codec and allows most efficient\applicable transcode or passthrough, but users signal chain may be more complicated than App > Display with built-in speakers. Allowing client-side selection of codecs would likely be appreciated.
I understand users can change client device settings and\or signal chain to work around this, but making this a feature of Plex clients allows more competition with the various streaming service options that do this very well out of box.
