This morning while I was on my commute, I noticed that podcasts were downloading to my phone - over 3G/4G, and using mobile data. This is a problem, as I don’t want to use my data unnecessarily on podcast downloads - and have specifically set the options on Plex Sync to not use mobile data.
It seems like the Podcasts functionality uses a completely different sync engine to the rest of Plex, which seems like an utterly flawed design. Why doesn’t the Podcasts functionality just download the episodes to the server, and then use the standard show/movie sync process and UI to upload to the clients? If it did that, you’d have a bunch of functionality (“Sync last x unread” and so on) which is currently missing from Podcasts in Plex. Seems like the podcasts team went off and built something without considering the rest of the Plex ecosystem, which means that it feels out of sorts with the rest of the platform.
Either way, though, can somebody from Plex please tell me how to prevent podcasts syncing over mobile data? I can’t find the option anywhere.
Understand. Presumably you could give the relevant people a nudge and point them to this thread and mumble something about good software design, re-use of code, and consistent UI, and then let them cogitate on that.
Keep in mind that that would not allow non PlexPass users to use offline mode with podcasts because they do not have the sync feature. Buy PlexPass you could say, but I was enjoying the design decision of plex dev department to allow offline podcast usage (for non PlexPass users).
It’s a nice theory, but it seems like it would have been far more trivial to predicate the sync logic based on content type + availability of PlexPass, rather than building an entire new distinct sync engine/process/GUI.
And if anything, it would have been a teaser - people would see the whole sync process working for podcasts and think “Wow, cool, if it lets me do it for Movies and Shows too, then a PlexPass is worthwhile”.
