Server Version#: 1.41.6.9685 (MacOS M1)
Player Version#: 2025.14.0 & 2025.15.0 (iPadOS 18.4.1)
UPDATE - This appears to be a bug, when downloading all Episodes from the season view, every episode added to my download queue is forced through a transcode. If I download individual shows, they don’t transcode.
Just removing the previous information here, as it wasn’t relevant to the bug that is actually causing this issue.
Issue - When downloading multiple shows (season download) in Plex client for iOS and Android, each episode is automatically transcoded to the highest quality, without regard for settings in the Plex client. This is confirmed by 15 people on these forums, and five family members/friends. Here is a screen shot confirming:
Ok, I’ve figured out the issue, transcoding only happens when you try to download all of the season files for a show. If I download individual episodes they download immediately without transcode.
So this looks to me to be a bug in the new “Season” download feature in 205.14.0.
I’ll move to server beta now and see if that resolves the issue for me.
@BigWheel this appears to be a bug, and I’m able to reproduce 100% of the time with any shows that I have.
To expand on this bug - downloading a season ignores the quality set in Settings/Downloads in the client, and transcodes at High quality. Downloading individual episodes honors the setting (Low/Medium/or High).
ETA: This is with the latest client and server versions, which both dropped yesterday.
thanks. i was really starting to lose my mind. guess i’ll download individual shows until this gets resolved. takes me about 15 minutes to download a whole season, but adding transcoding it went to like 6 hours. :-/
Sure. Some more info - it seems to get stuck on deciding after downloading an episode, deleting it, then trying to download it again - as one does while testing. At some point something times out, and it works again. (Edit - looks like it takes ~5-20 minutes for the decider to unstuck itself. Leaving on “deciding” eventually responds.)
When I went back into the app to get the screenshot and started the download, it fired right up. Let it finish, deleted it, and started it again and viola. This is with the same file that was stuck on deciding before, so it appears something gets stuck on the backend and then clears - how long this takes I don’t know. (Edit - it takes like 5-20 minutes.) Force-closing the client has no effect on this.
Additionally, the app does not seem to be respecting high/medium/low settings anymore on even single downloads like it did before - everything seems to be “high” now - further testing required, but it’s a PITA when it takes forever between test attempts waiting on the decider to respond. (This is with HEVC encoding enabled. Have not tried it with disabling HEVC, since I use it extensively).
Edit: Individual episodes are respecting high/medium/low settings. Wish we had granular control though - low quality produces tiny files, but horrible results, and both medium & high are larger than the original files. And strangely enough, Medium is larger than High.
Testing season downloads now.
Edit: Seasons do indeed respect the quality setting. And Low now has acceptable results, as apposed to the previous app version (and previous server version).
Test file sizes:
Original = 3.06G
Low = 500M
Med = 4.5G
High = 3.3G
Edit: Today’s server update has resolved the “deciding” bug.
