It would be nice if plex clients would cache content that you’ve already streamed. Sync is pretty elaborate, and just allowing users to say: use … GB of my storage for cache would be a nice way to optimise the streaming experience and reduce server load (as content wouldn’t have to be transcoded every time).
The other side of this however, how often will it be the case where you watch the same thing twice before you would need to flush that cache anyway to make room for other stuff. Not trying to down your idea, I’m just curious on the use case.
If you don’t want to deal with transcoding each time perhaps the new Optimized Versions feature would help with what you are looking for. That way the server would only have to transcode the item once and you could sync that version. This would use server space as well however.
You are really just wanting to watch the movie while you sync it sounds like, but really once you watch it would you watch it again? And if you were going to, I personally, would just sync it beforehand.
I’m mainly thinking of music playback for this feature. I often listen to the same tracks more than once ;), also my entire library is in flac and ios doesn’t play that. So it has to transcode every time I play something.
Storing my entire music library in transcoded format is a little wasteful I think (at least I don’t have the space). Also, transcoding every time uses a lot of server resources and bandwidth. All that could be saved by caching (and pretty efficiently as well as the transcoded mp3s don’t use a lot of space).
I would think this is more useful than sync as it requires no user intervention past setting the cache limit.
Interesting, guess I was looking at it more from a video perspective (my main use case). I can kind of see the rational with music in that case, but not sure if I would agree with it still. I’ll be interested to see other peoples perspective on it though. 
This absolutely… have a look at how the Google Music app works. With caching enabled, up to the set GB, whatever I’ve streamed/played is usually available to re-listen to. It’s seamless and you always have some music downloaded dynamically, reducing the time spent having to pre-select stuff to download beforehand #livinginthefuture
Any feedback on this from the plex team?
This thread is a duplicate of https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/221974/automatic-mobile-caching-music#top
Even though it is a few days younger than the other one, I will close this one because the other one already has more votes.
please respect the rules for this subforum
- search first if the request has already been posted before
- only one feature per post
Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate
