I have 2 mobile phones (Android) for my kids for long drives or flights. They have a lot of storage and I use it mainly to download movies and shows to their phones so they can watch stuff offline.
Unfortunately the download feature is pretty buggy as soon as you download more than just a handful of movies. The more you download the worse it gets.
Please improve this feature to make it less of a hassle to preload your phones with content from the Plex server.
Any particular issues / areas of improvement?
I guess it’s an issue with the local database. Once you have downloaded a bunch of movies and shows the whole download process becomes incredibly slow.
Like you want to download another movie and it will take many minutes before it even starts the download. And even though it says it downloads at 60Mbps, it gets stuck often and downloading a movie of like 1GB will take like 1-2 hours. Eventually it will stop downloading at all and only after you restart the Plex App it will continue.
The whole preloading is done in the same local network like the Plex server is. The phone is capable to download Files from the server with 500-600Mbps but Plex Downloads will never be fast and stuck often.
But as I said, this mainly happens if the phone already has several douzens of movies and shows (each with several dozens episodes) in the local storage already.
Currently one of the phones has 108 elements (330GB total) on the phone already. I try to add 14 new movies of about 20GB in total. It is running for 4 hours already and did download about 10% and I already had to restart the app twice because it suddenly stops the download.
So it would be great to fix this issue or maybe even add a feature to preload phones or tablets with loads of stuff from the Plex server with high speed.
It could be trying to optimise them. Did you set them all to original quality in the settings of the app (settings - downloads)?
Yes, everything is set to “original quality” and I also don’t see the server transcoding anything.
Everything is set to original quality and I don’t see any transcoding happening on the server
I’ve found this to happen with android devices for standard file transfers. There’s a write cache in system memory then once that runs out, writing to internal flash or an SD card is super slow. Just something to look at. Writing also takes longer once space is taken up on the flash storage.
There must be ways around this. If I use any cloud storage and download hundreds of Files, even if it’s 200GB or more in total, the speed never drops that. Low
