it's clearly 3, stop spreading misinformation
this is probably somehow related to changes introduced somewhere in 0.19.4, I've been seeing this for months at this point, as we've been on a 0.19.4 pre-release relatively early due to done federation issues
I can sell you a copy of lemmys source code, are you interested?
reencoding is not required in advance, it happens on the fly if needed.
download still needs to be completed first usually, but you can save a lot of time if you compromise in quality.