The latest Plex player on iPad (8.12.1) looks to be failing on some transcoded content. So far, I’ve only found a few 4k movies that failed to playback at 1080p (8M). Same video and same playback settings transcodes fine on web client, AppleTV, and my iPhone. Because of that, I don’t think it’s the server. I’m running the latest Docker container. In addition, I happened to know I successfully played at least one of the failing videos before upgrading the client.
Looking around the web, it looks like something like this has happened before.