So I have an Apple TV 4K conected to a 1080p display. Streaming 1080p content from my server works fine. Steaming 4K tries to transcode. Is this really by design? The Apple TV is capable of streaming 4K, I would imagine the client would handle the downscaling aswell. Having the server transcode for such a trivial task seems like poor design?
What video settings do you have in the Plex app?
Can you post a screenshot of the Now Playing section of the server dashboard when browsing to https://app.plex.tv/desktop?
What makes you think the atv has any kind of built in hardware scaler?
Even if the resolution was downscaled, there is still the problem of hdr to sdr conversion, otherwise the color will be messed up.
So, if you do not have a full 4K/hdr video/audio setup, then you should probably not be trying to use 4K content.
Well I really dont know if the ATV has a built in scaler, Im just used to PCs and Macs that does all this automatically. Plex for phones downscales to whatever resolution the screen is as well. If the ATV doesnt, shouldnt this be expected from the software then? Infuse on ATV both downscales and tonemaps, when streaming from PMS in the same enviroment.
Also, I do have plenty full 4K/HDR setups. But I have 5 TVs in this house, and two of those are still 1080p. It seemed like getting Apple TVs for those was a good idea before I realized the issues I would run into.
Video is set to max/original
In PMS its saying its direct streaming but no data is sendt. PMS has transcoding turned off. After a while, the client says the server isnt powerful enough to transcode. If I turn transcoding on (same settings in the client) everything works but, well, it transcodes and pretty much kills my i7.
The ATV should scale, I believe. It also tone maps 
it may scale UP, but it doesn’t appear to scale DOWN from 4k to 1080, otherwise plex wouldn’t be transcoding?
It should do this already on the Apple TV 4K, from my understanding, but not on the 1080p fourth gen Apple TV.
I’ll try this out tonight, I can fairly easily move the 4K device to a secondary TV that isn’t 4K…
Works fine for me, 1080p TV / Apple TV 4K, wireless connection (WAP is in the same room).
What version PMS do you have installed and on which OS?
What happens if you enable transcoding on the server?
Does nothing appear in the Dashboard / Now Playing section at all??
Thats great. Not sure what Im doing wrong so Im a little puzzled. But Ill retry this tomorrow.
Im running the latest PMS on Windows 10
If I enable transcoding it works but these files are destroying my old 2600K
I did notice a similar problem today, with a friend trying to stream from me using a plex kodi plugin under linux. It turned out that my web-streaming was set to max 2 mbps. This in combination with transcoding turned off turned out to be a problem, even though he wasnt using a browser. Im wondering if the ATV may have been affected by the same setting? Doesnt affect other devices ive tried though
Are you using the enhanced player or the regular one?
Enhanced; I don’t recall you posting which you’re using?
I used regular. I set it up under a different account, not my plexpass user. Thats probably whats causing my problems.
Im an idiot. Sorry about all this.
Good news then – in the latest Apple TV beta the enhanced player is now available to all users and should show up in the next regular release for everyone else 
thats great news! thanks for the update!
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