Just got my Plex Pass, and I’ve been trying to watch downloaded (I think it’s called sync’ed) episodes.
I’m having some difficulties in understanding how this works, it keeps complaining about not being connected to the internet.
What happens is that I cannot access the server from outside of home LAN (if someone has a good tutorial how to set this up please link it also), this being said, I’ve acquired the Plex Pass so that I can watch my series when commuting to work.
I do have internet connection, and I did log in with my account, I can see the series in Home screen (if I try to open Shows, it gets stuck on loading), but even then, when I try to play, the connection error pops up.
Has you can see below, these are the steps I took:
You need to specifically switch on “Offline Browsing” from the side menu (tap your Plex user icon).
This is another annoying regression in the mobile UI on android; before, if the app was offline, it simply showed you your synced libraries. Now it forces you to manually switch to Offline Browsing, and then select a specific library because it doesn’t show you anything useful on the Home tab.
The additional frustration is that if you forgot to switch off Offline Browsing after then your app doesn’t update the watched status back to your Plex server, and cannot sync new content. Very frustrating.
You would also think that selecting “Downloads and Sync” from the side menu when in Offline Browsing mode would simply let you select content that you can play, but no.
Some bizarre design decisions going on here. I can deal with it fine but literally every one of my shared users, managed users etc have had to ask me a few times how to get to synced content because they can’t find it. This is bad UX.
For me, it is the 1st time getting Plex Pass, so I didn’t have this before, either way it is just unclear how the app works, I truly thought it would require connection to the server, which for me this was the whole point why I got Plex Pass
symbol.
