I have the latest Plex Media Server for Windows running (locally) for some time. It works fine for local and remote clients of many kinds (Windows, WebOS, Android, iOS, browsers, Samsung TVs), browsing and playing. I don’t think many other users try to use the download function though.
Specifically it works fine for browsing and playing on my Android phone (Pixel 6 Pro, latest Android version, latest Plex standard and beta player versions tried), both on my local network and remotely.
Now to the issue - the Downloads function. Since the launch of this feature it has never worked locally in the Android player on my phone. However - it works fine in the same player when I cut the wifi and use the mobile network, and it works fine for the Windows player locally (and remotely).
The player seems to retry downloading frequently, it switches between the warning sign triangle and a “waiting” circle, the error message in the app is “There was an error downloading this file. Swipe to remove or tap to retry.” and when it retries it says “Waiting to download”.
I have tried finding a clue in the logs and tried out different settings for server and player to see if anything would improve. I find no obvious reason in the logs, there are no outright errors, it seems that the server starts sending something and then shortly after it says that the client stopped. Transcoding or direct playing does not seem to matter. Small or large files does not seem to matter. Media encoding and presence/absence of extra streams/subtitles does not seem to matter. I have added DNS rebind protection exclusion for plex.direct to my local router, still no improvement. Swtiching to the latest beta version of the Android player has not helped.
The problem has persisted for a long time, through local network redesigns and router change.
I am looking for advice on how to fix or troubleshoot this further.
Please note that the server works fine otherwise, downloading from both LAN and WAN works fine for other clients, and the Android client works as expected on LAN and WAN for other things and also can download fine over WAN. Hence it is difficult to say if this is a client or server side issue or a combination thereof.
Added comment: I just no learned how to check logs for the Android client, so the logs referred to above is only for the server.
Update - some progress with the problem!
I tried the many workaround ideas mentioned here, but none worked.
I have also recently had some problem with remote access status going off and on frequently. I finally (after trying many many things) fixed that by simply disabling DoS protection on my ASUS RT-AC86U router. Now Downloads work fine again.
Since I’ve tried so many things in between for the remote access issue I am not sure that this was the exact change that got Downloads working.
But - then I tried some larger files, and again the same problem, only on LAN… Shorter/smaller files still worked… “Activity” also told me that the server was transcoding my downloads, despite everything seemingly being set to “Original” quality (Android app → Settings → Downloads → Video Quality: Original, Android app → Settings → Quality → Video Quality → Automatically adjust quality: off, Remote streaming quality: Maximum, Home streaming: Recommended “Videos will play at maximum quality”). However, after changing the setting “Android app → Settings → Quality → Video Quality → Home streaming” from “Recommended - Videos will play at maximum quality” by turning off “Use recommended settings - Videos will play at maximum quality” and verifying that the now displayed quality settings on that page were set to “Maximum” the LAN Downloads finally works also for some larger files, probably because it doesn’t try to encode them anymore. But not everything is good, the setups till causes some video files to trigger transcoding when trying to Download them, and it fails… The server says it is trying to encode them but is making very sloe progress and not utilizing CPU or GPU to any noticeable degree. The files that causes this has only been 4K HDR so far, and I can otherwise play them streaming in the Android app with the internal player fine without any transcoding, on LAN as well as WAN.
So after turning off DoS and finding and adjusting that very deceitfully described option in the Android app settings it seems there are still two remaining issue here:
The Android player and/or the Plex server somehow deciding that content needs transcoding even though it shouldn’t be necessary and all options are set not to.
The transcoding doesn’t work properly for these downloads, even though transcoding of the same content works fine when streaming (if I force transcoding by options).
I have hardware transcoding working fine with QSV on Windows, HDR->SDR tonemapping is turned off because of the very heavy CPU use otherwise.
