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.
