I know lots of people having random issues with Downloads. I just figured what could one of the issues.
Certain video encoding codecs will cause download to not play. I was able to stream the TV series but when I downloaded the series it would fail to play. The series would download fine. It did not matter if it was transcoded or not. When I went to go play episode, Plex on Android gave me an error about not a connect to the server.
In a long shot, I converted all of the source videos to x264 and re-downloaded them and they played fine.
Depending on your download preferences on the Android client, Plex will either download an optimized version (=transcoded) or the original file. If the original file isn’t compatible with the device, the app won’t be able to play it.
I did that, and it didn’t matter either way. Even if your forced a plex based transcode, the resulting files that get pushed to Plex for android won’t play.
I had to manually convert the source files with ffmpeg to x264 (they are 480p files) from xvid for them to play correctly as an offline download.
