I’ve been a plex pass member for a few years. The vast majority of what I need doesn’t require the pass but, when it’s road trip season, it’s indispensable. I primarily use it to provide offline content for my kids on their tablets. Sync was a bit finicky but, once I figured out its nuances, it worked great.
Downloads, on the other hand, have been an unmitigated headache for me. Every download fails. I’ve tried every suggestion I could find in the multiple thread of other people having issues (use “original quality” - which isn’t a good option on my kids’ space-limited devices, disabled DNS rebind protection, add plex.direct to the router’s host file, change up the DNS, etc). After approximately ten hours of work and over 100 attempts, I almost have one child’s media ready to go. And it’s not like I found the perfect combination of factors where it now works, either. Even on that device (the only one that’s successfully downloaded anything), I still can’t download one show no matter what I’ve tried. Getting two movies downloaded took around 15 tries each before it finally worked. The five episodes each of three TV shows averaged 20 attempts for each show.
Frankly, I don’t have time for this. Judging from the other threads sharing issues with the new functionality, it seems that I’m not alone. “Original Quality” worked fine on my iPad, but rather defeats one of the primary purposes for using Plex for my kids. I don’t want to reencode all my media manually like I used to - that’s why I have Plex. Some of the other functions that were depreciated with Sync, like central management of media across downloaded devices, was also really useful to me.
I know that from a development perspective, it sucks to go “backwards.” Please realize that from a user’s perspective, the new functionality is a huge step backwards in terms of my time, experience, and use for your platform. Is there any way we can get Sync back so we can at least view our content offline again?
