Server Version#: 4.146.0
Player Version#: iOS 2025.14
When transcoding for download the server seems limited to 1 transcode. This was confirmed by my family recently trying to batch download to several iPhones at the airport and we all were waiting on each other for tanscodes.
I’m running Plex in docker on Unraid with hardware acceleration that seems to handle multiple transcodes no issue for playback. The video card 1660Ti has tons of memory and is patched with the latest drivers. The server is set to unlimited transcodes.
For example during playback, here are two iphones playing back 2 transcodes at the same time:
Transcoding may be a single threaded operation in which case only 1 can be occurring at a time - this would make sense to me if you want downloads to be as fast as possible, although the reality is downloads with Plex are still a mess.
To me, download transcodes should operate the same way as stream transcodes which would actually likely make the process faster - alas, here we are.
My rule of thumb with Plex is do anything server related (downloads, optimization, etc) before you leave. Being at an airport you’re also at the mercy of their wifi which is typically terrible on top of being shared among all other airport staff and passengers.
You can’t make a claim like this and not show your work
How do you know this is actually a thing? If it IS actually a thing, I’d say it’s a bug that should be reported.
You didn’t address me either, but this is a forum where people interact. That’s super rude. I’m curious too and hope others won’t respond that way if I ask a question.
You previously shared that the transcode limit for downloading is expected to be 2.
I wonder if something has changed. I notice a few odd maybe-related things when I try to download multiple items to a single iPhone (including TestFlight latest).
(Hardware Transcoding is Disabled, Maximum simultaneous video transcode is Unlimited.)
In the iPhone app:
Both downloads appear, Queued.
One is Transcoding and showing progress.
One is Waiting.
On Plex Web:
Only the second download is visible.
The first download doesn’t appear in Activity/Dashboard/Conversions at all. It is invisible.
The second download appears in Activity/Conversions, Waiting.
When the first item finishes Transcoding, it then appears in the Plex Web Activity menu as a Media Download, while it’s downloading, and the second item becomes invisible in Plex Web.
I’m nor surprised there is a disconnect between Testflight and Plex/web
They are two different teams working on different tasking and schedules.
It sounds like TestFlight is the correct behavior and Plex/Web is not functioning correctly. ( Hosted or Bundled web app? - They are almost always different versions)
I thought it might be interesting that the active download is invisible in Plex Web because it might imply that the client and server are communicating in a different way about what’s a playback transcode vs. what’s a download transcode, perhaps there’s an accounting issue.
Maybe if that communication or categorization has changed it could explain both the strange display in Plex Web and the only-one-transcode situation.
I’m actually using the 6x ffmpeg streams for frigate, an open source NVR built around real-time AI object detection. I turned them off and still get the same 1x transcode limit for downloads:
I went looking deeper and found where Engineering and QA are working on this
There are some situations PMS wasn’t handling; Download/Transcode not being listed is one of them.
It looks like the targeted resolution release is for PMS 1.42.0 but this is still in-process work so it might not make the 1.42.0 release cut. (time will tell)
