Disable "Plex Download" feature now! (Lacking Features and is an expliotitive practice)

General Discussions Plex Features
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The new Plex Download feature which is to replace Plex Sync by the end of 2021 is missing crtical features that make it unusable for many if not most usecases.

The Good Features:
1: Ability to globally select the audio and video bitrates (better than the sync option, but a regression to what Sync used to be when it first came out)
2: Ability to maximise compatability with the device you are downloading to (new but probably not really nedded, at least in my case)
3: Storage limit slider. (unchanged)

The Missing curcial features:
1: Limit number o tiems to download. I only want to take a certain number of episodes with me when I travel so I limit this to ten per tV Show I might be watching at the time. This feature is missing. So its either select each episode individually or download the entire TV Show including expisodes watched. Bring back the options to limit the number of items downloaded.
2: Download unwatched only. In combination with the item limit downloading only the unwatched episodes of a TV show being watched is essential to manage disk space and not saturate a device. Most people do not buy mobile phones or Tablets with TBs of space in them due othe cost. Because of this, being able to limit items and restrict to unwatched items is a must.

Whilst there may be only two feature listed above they are critical and without makes the storing of media on a device rediculously cumbersome and difficult.

The name “Downloads” indicates feature set that Plex Downloads gives us. The ability to simply download something or everything, Where are “Sync” indicates that you are Syncing content to your device with the ability to automatically remove and add content based on Rule Limits and Restrictions, a much better feature set and one that has worked well for approx 10 years. Plex Deves if there is something wrong with the PLex Sync feature then fix it or rpleace it with more up to date efficient coding rather then replacing the entire Function with a reduced feature set that no-one will likely use.

Additionally hding this feature behind a Pay Wall for shared users is also a nasty strategy.. Its my server I should be able to allow anyone who I share media with to be able to sync if I want them to and not have to get them to pay a subscription per month or a lifetime payout to be able to sync onctent to their device of choice.

I’ve disabled Plex Downloads feature because of the reaons above. It does not fit most peoples use case and allows Pex to exploit people I share media with into dishing out money for a service that they never wanted.

I;ve been a plex user since its conception, bought a lifetime pass over 10 years ago and have highly invested a lot of time and money into making my setup work for me as much as possible. But this decision to reduce the feature set to a point where it is unsable and then make people poay extra for it is redicuous. I am highly dissapointed and seriously considering moving to another media server product even if it is not necessarily as stable as Plex because it does the basics well.

Here are a few links to other peoples posts on this topic who have similar thoughts about this new “Feature”:

If you agree with my post or the posts listed below speak up now by posting responses below before they force this reduced feature on us at the end of 2021. Perhaps they make listen if we shout loud enough (although past expirience says that they won’t).

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As you can see, I was totally lost lost with this new downgrade. I kinda got the hang of it, but I’m no power user, I’m now log reader. All I know is that when I tried, my TV Shows couldn’t Download. When I disabled the new downgrade feature, voilá, worked like a charm, like magic, like it should, reliable.

Mind you, I added the same shows, at the same bitrate and resolution I tried with the new downgrade feature.

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That was my fear. Thank you for confirming that. Sync worked like wizardry for me, like magic, I’d set it and forget. Even when shows ended and a new season came out, all of the sudden I was reminded that my TV Show was back and it was already on my phone.

Maybe the Plex guys think we all have iPhone 13 Pro Max with 512GB of storage, or media servers with hardware decoder, 16 CPU cores, and terabytes of storage. it’s not like than don’t know what devices we have.

I need to very carefully manage the storage on my phone. That’s why I make my CPU Hurt super when it’s slowling transcoding, the smaller the file the better, and I always transcode before sending to my phone, it doesn’t have a 4K screen, it doesn’t support HDR, it’s not a fancy screen. I mean, I actually just recently enabled hardware transcoding with nvenc, the files are still very manageable in size.

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With sync, I liked being able to manage the items downloaded/synced via the web interface. It was nice that I could manage the synced items for ALL my devices in one place. Headed on a road trip? Sync shows for dad on one tablet and kids shows on the kids tablet. The tablets then all got updated with relevant content. I didn’t need to go track down each tablet to download each individual item.

To top it off, the new downloads is SLOW AF. It seems like the download keeps failing and retrying when downloading a large number of items.

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I used sync in a similar way for travel with the kids’ Amazon Fire tablets. Their profiles only show movies that I’ve manually tagged as “kids”. My Plex server transcodes and stores a second copy of all of these movies at relatively low quality 720p. Each Fire 7 tablet is set to auto log-in to their user and Sync was used to keep all “kids” movies (watched or not) synced on a 256gb SD cards.

Add a new movie to the Plex server, tag it “kids” and it would show up synced on their Fire tablets. .

Keeping a lower quality transcoded copy on the server meant I only had to transcode once for multiple devices and each download was faster.

The new Download method is not so fun. I’m not looking forward to having to manually queue each movie for download on each device.

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I came here to mention all of this. I get that sometime you need to reinvent the wheel to get a feature working correctly. But before you release a new version of something you should at least have feature parity with the existing old version. This never seems to be a priority with developers anymore, not just plex. I have found loop hole I have found to get things back the way they were, at least till they kill it as well. Use to server side to push sync content to your device(s). Hopefully the devs are seeing all comments and complaints and decide to keep sync around until they can make downloads closer to some form of feature parity with sync.

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I have been a plex pass member for years and this downloads feature just sux. At least sync worked a little. Now the download never completes. By the way indirect on Lan is still buggy.

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Sync applied major weight into my decision to go with Plex and Plex Pass, another was making it easy and (somewhat) secure to access my content outside my home. Those two are pretty much what made me opt for Plex, and at least one of them is not that hard to find these days.

Honestly, Emby is already installed on my server indexing all my content in parallel with Plex. If this Download feature don’t work magically for me like Sync always did when they kill it, there’s no point in using Plex. All I’ll have will be regret, Plex Pass is not cheap in my part of the world.

I use solutions like this to make my life easier, pleasanter, and not otherwise harder.

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I tried Download with the same settings as Sync. Somehow, the downloads didn’t completed after transcoding. To be honest, it looked faster, but how’s failing faster better than slowly working every single time? I’m sleeping when sync happens, I don’t want to check my phone everyday to see if Download is working or not. And here we are now, watching something that work reliably (at least for me it did, it worked magically) for something that the devs say it’s better, just because.

It must have to at least work reliably first to be just as good. It’s far from better as it is! Just by separating the options for quality made it less intuitive already. I never had to read anything to make sync work, I just saw the option and I knew what it was. I saw the options and I immediately started using it, just like that. With Downloads I thought I couldn’t pick resolution and bitrate, well, I wasn’t seeing it there in the options on the screen. I had to read a blog post do find out, so, already less intuitive out of the gate, for me.

Download is not a better name, as Plex folks say in the blog. Download is to click/touch something and transfer it, in that instant. Sync, to me, means making two things in parity, like synchronizing watches: making two clocks match their timing to the second; synchronized swimming: two athletes performing in a manner that their timed movements complete each other. Synchronization are things, people, a system in unison. Download isn’t. How dare they saying in the blog that “slightly less-confusing name”? How isn’t Sync a “less-confusing name” to a function that synchronize content in two or more devices?

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When you choose to Download a show, you should get a menu with options on how many episodes to Download. Options are all, 1, or X number of episodes, even X number of unwatched episodes. If you choose unwatched episodes, it will automatically download more as you watch them.

2: Download unwatched only. In combination with the item limit downloading only the unwatched episodes of a TV show being watched is essential to manage disk space and not saturate a device.

See above. If you are referring to Playlists, you are correct and these options are not there. We are investigating if it would be possible to bring this back in the future.

As a work-around, you can create a smart playlist using the same “kids” tag. Download the playlist and as you add more content, the playlist updates and they get Downloaded.

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@anon18523487 - Thanks for the update. I have since found that info out and had a hell of time get anything to download at all. Anything I set to download just sat there saying it was downloading when it did absolutely nothing for over 2 days irrespective of how long I sat and stared at the screen making sure it didn;t turn off.

But!!! I did find out that this was due to my DNS server not considering an IP privided by a plex.direct (external) DNS entry as private and therfore responded with a NO DATA response whenever a Plex Client asked for a DNS entry with a local IP address it.

It does seem odd though that the Sync function could still sync content before I put my work around in but Downloads could not.

The downloads work now, kinda. The screen needs to be on and the app loaded all the time for the downloads to work at all. We need background downloading to be put back in as a feature as downloading lots of data (either large singular files or lots of TV Episodes) takes a lot longer to complete because the average person does not have several hours to baby sit their tablet or phone.

Playlists are an issue though. I use Smart Play Lists already to collate Shows that a part of the same universe in Air Date order. Then I sync (now download) these playlists to my tablet or phone. The reason I do this is that they typically have crossover episodes from one show to another that continue a story or they have episodes that refer to another espidoe of a different show in that universe. (Chicago PD/MED/Fire and Greys, Private Practive and Station 19 to name but two universes). Because some of these TV shows have a very large amount of episodes and that I have not watched all of them I would only sync approx 10 unwatched at a time. Now I cannot do this as I can only download all the playlists content (for a show Like Greys where I have approx 200 Unwatched episodes it means I cannot do this any more). Yes I could change the Playlist to only include x number of unwatched expisodes but why should I have to reinvent the wheel in aplaylist when Sync does this already.

Please ask the Devs to put some priority into amending the Plex Download feature for Playlists so that it mimics the options available for Downlinad TV Shows.

I feel liek the main problem with this feature release is that the first most people heard of it was when the client updated we were told Sync was going and Downloads would replace it without any info about feature parity or explaination why it was happening. On the whole I have hardley ever had issues with Sync not working for ten years. Replacing a criticall feature with a new one with no consulation/advanced warning (blog post came way too late and did not answer all questions) or equal feature parity was always gonna get the backs up of large population of Plex users.

In addition to that hiding the ability for shared user to to use this feature behiond their own subscriuption is rediculous. I know its only for new users and existing users will continue to be able to use Plex Downloads. But how long that will that last ( six moths, a year, forever) and who do I contact when my shared users have problems and are now paying for a feature that doesn’t work? This is essentially making my shared users pay to use the Plex Downloads feature and increases my responsbility to make it work without providing any means to let me do so. I can totally see myself getting harrased by some people I share or will share my Plex server with when this feature doen’t work as expected and because they are now paying for it they will expect it to work. It make it feel more and more like my PLex server is not my own and I do not control what happens to it. Not a good feeling to have considering Plex’s beginnings.

TLDR:
Whilt this feature is better than I initially thought, there are some missing features that need to be added back in the mix. Consulation or advanced notification before rolling it out and removing the sync feature without any notice would at minimum be nice but at best provide a better chance at customer satisfaction. Additionally if you are going to charge for a service then direct support should be supplied along with it. Seems only logical/fair to me.

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Downloads uses a new mechanism, but it missed the DNS rebinding issue. It’s being fixed.

That’s an OS issue. Plex will continue to run in the background, but if the OS chooses to kill the app, there isn’t anything we can do about that. If you keep the app on the Downloads page, it should keep the screen from turning off and the app from moving to the background while a Download is active.

Downloads was meant to be a faster, more stable feature. We are looking to potentially re-add this in the future.

Consider yourself lucky. We’ve had many, many, many reports of Sync not working.

This was announced and been in testing since the end of June, maybe you missed it. Sync is Dead (almost). Long Live Downloads! (Android)

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Hmm. Definitely did not see these posts. Probably because I do not spend a lot of time on these forums. The only time I knew that this feature was a thing was when the client updated and told me my sync’d content would be removed at the end of the year. There was no links to Forum announcements or any Annoucements in the Plex App or Server notification area. Which as a heavy user of Sync was a bit of a surprise.

For me, being a beta tester, I would appreciate a notification in the beta client to at least advise things are going to change and maybe provide a link to the new feature blog/forum post so I could test it myself before this was announced as fully fledged replacment feature with seemingly no way for to feed anything back.

I also notice you are avoiding talking about the paywall situation. Hopefully this is because there are discussions about it and something may or may not change before end of the year ( not holding my breath though).

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Oh yeah. I may have also missed this, but is there a way to control the downloads from the web interface like you could with sync? I don’t seem to be able to but perhaps the web UI needs an update frist?

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No. Downloads is controlled entirely from the client end. This was one of the complexities with Sync. There are no plans at this time to bring this back, maybe in the future.

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You really should change the title of your post as it’s misleading and disingenuous. Downloads is in no way exploiting anyone. I’m sorry that Plex hopes to earn a small sum of money for providing this service to you for nothing at its core. Plex is a 100% viable platform without ever putting a dime into it. All they ask is for some more advanced features that take work on the back end from them that people contribute a little money, that is not exploitation. Plex is still a business after all.

Also I don’t know anyone who calls themselves a “beta tester” yet doesn’t interact with the community at all. You said yourself that you spend very little time on the forums, and it seems you post almost never. So you probably shouldn’t call yourself a beta tester, and also you probably shouldn’t be running beta branches of software that you aren’t actively engaged in. With the numerous beta programs I have participated in all the way from small niche projects like little Android apps to large ones like the initial Google Music beta and they all used platforms like this to convey information back and forth. Its important to engage with it because as a tester the feedback is important to the company, and the results of that data are important to the testers.

As for not being notified, I don’t know how you didn’t know unless you choose to ignore every place that it was shown. There were forum posts like the one shared earlier, discussions about it on Reddit, and update notes when you updated your apps. Hell there was an announcement on the server page. I don’t know how this isn’t satisfactory unless you expect them to come to your house and tell you.

I think the sum of this is that you likely would have avoided your issue by being a little proactive and spending some time on the forums or the Reddit community like “beta testers” do. As someone who runs a fairly large server with a good number of users I personally feel as though it is my responsibility to proactively manage my server and keep my users updated. Maybe you should try a little of that also.

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@Blkbyrd - Thank you for your unwarranted and unasked for opinions about me, my expirience and perceived activity in the cummunity. I decided to leave it a few days to responde to you (something you might think of doing in the future) to make my response to you as complete and clear as possible.

“You really should change the title of your post as it’s misleading and disingenuous. Downloads is in no way exploiting anyone. I’m sorry that Plex hopes to earn a small sum of money for providing this service to you for nothing at its core.”

Your point of view seems to be skewed and appears to be responding out of context of this thread. The exploitation comes from charging users who do not own a Plex server for the use of this feature on server from which content is shared. This is different from the current iteration of the sync feature. Originally the Sync feature was only available to PlexPass Subscribers and Plex decided to make it available to everyone. Now they are back tracking on this.

“Plex is a 100% viable platform without ever putting a dime into it.”

I agree that the basic feature set is great, depending on your use case. But if you already pay for a Plex Pass to unlock features on your server then it is reasonable to expect that the features on my server I Pay for are available to my shared users.

“All they ask is for some more advanced features that take work on the back end from them that people contribute a little money, that is not exploitation.”

As a Plex Pass subcriber I should be able to share content on my server and the associated feature sets without the end user being shared with having to pay any extra than purchasing the Plex App on their device (iOS and Android devices specifically). Plex already gets a single payment for the app if the shared user does not have their own Plex Pass already. Any more than that seems unreasonable.

“Plex is still a business after all”

Correct and as a paying customer I have been exasperated by their lack of direct support. A post in a public form where there is no garuntee of a response from anyone that works at Plex is not a proper support environement for business of the size that Plex has grown and continues to grow into. Their responses of late have improved as MODs are instroduced, but from what I have gathered some (not all) of the MODs are most likely not on the Plex Payroll and do this as sideline in their spare time. Granted there are some great cummunity memembers that are willing to help with many providing excellent advice, but this type of support model really only suits small businesses. When you start charging to service an end user will expecrt a certing level of support should any part of that service stop working or not work as intended. A proper method of directly requesting support is, in my opinion, needed for Server owners at a minimum.

“Also I don’t know anyone who calls themselves a “beta tester” yet doesn’t interact with the community at all. You said yourself that you spend very little time on the forums, and it seems you post almost never. So you probably shouldn’t call yourself a beta tester, and also you probably shouldn’t be running beta branches of software that you aren’t actively engaged in.”

There are multiple method of reporting issues when Beta testing and posting in a forum is just one. That I have not posted often in these forums is not a reason to assume I have not played my part when using beta release branches.

“With the numerous beta programs I have participated in all the way from small niche projects like little Android apps to large ones like the initial Google Music beta and they all used platforms like this to convey information back and forth. Its important to engage with it because as a tester the feedback is important to the company, and the results of that data are important to the testers.”

Your comment about participation for beta testers is correct. But your statement feels like an attack targeted at me speficially based on assumptions. Did I offend you in someway? Did you feel like I was unreasonable in my replies or my opinions? I am sure if the Plex MODs or DEVs wanted to speak to me about them that they are fully capable of doing so and don’t require your “assistance”.

“As for not being notified, I don’t know how you didn’t know unless you choose to ignore every place that it was shown. There were forum posts like the one shared earlier, discussions about it on Reddit, and update notes when you updated your apps. Hell there was an announcement on the server page. I don’t know how this isn’t satisfactory unless you expect them to come to your house and tell you.”

Posting about new developing features in a sub thread of the Plex Community Forums seems logical. But it does require that all beta testers constantly monitor this sub forum to determine if there is anything to test. Not unreasonable but also not surprising that the posts can be missed.

Why would I look for an anouncement about new client side features in the “server page”? Why would anyone expect that to be a thing?

How would I know to look at a 3rd party unofficial forum for a notification about new features in a beta branch of a client app? Thats a bit like me asking you to be aware of a notification posted in another galaxy that states that the earth is being to be demolished to make way for a hypserspace bypass and not tell you where the notificaiton is or when to look for it. Seems unreasonable.

Granted there may have been notifications in the beta client udpate notes I may have missed. But as the first one that mentions it TestFlight is over 70 days old I cannot determine that now.

I could have looked at the Plex forums but the iOS Announment thread does not include beta updates (Plex for iOS - #156 by Stevenson-Price)
and the first mention of Downloads is on August 3rd. If you view this post from the point of view that you knew that the term “Downloads” is directly referencing the replacement of the Plex Sync feature instead of the ability to download content from the webUI (which has been present for so long I cannot recall when it was implemented) then yeah I could see that as an annoucement. But thats a stretch.

Unless I am missing something I do not see sub forums related to Beta relases in the Annoucement Forum.
Additionally, unless I really missing it, I can only see annoucement threads for Roku, Android TV and Android Mobile devies in the testing/Player Betas sub forums. Where is the iOS Thread?
Addditionally the “Beta HomePage” link listed in TestFlight app links to the main plex.tv page which does not mention annoucements for Beta update releases.

"I think the sum of this is that you likely would have avoided your issue by being a little proactive and spending some time on the forums or the Reddit community like “beta testers” do.

Apart from your response being full of assumptions it also suggests that I should have known that Plex was going to announce a new feature before it was announced and gone looking for it. Are you part Vogon or something?
Also based on your response I am making an assumption (which is probably wrong because I know nothing about you) that you have 24 hours a day 7 days a week to monitor these locations for annoucements, fully test each and every feature and then log issues on the Plex forums, Reddit and anywhere else you might frequent. I am glad if my assumptions are true that you have that time. I do not and resent the assumption that I do. Like most of the beta testers here I need to work to earn money and have other responsabilities which prevent me from doing that.

“As someone who runs a fairly large server with a good number of users I personally feel as though it is my responsibility to proactively manage my server and keep my users updated. Maybe you should try a little of that also.”

Wow! I didn’t realise people still road a high horse like that any more. How large your server is and how many users you have is irrelevant to this thread and your assunmptions about me. You have no idea about the amount of work I have and continue to put in to my servers (yes multiple), how many people I share content from these servers with or how proactive I am in supporting them. That I posted about this new feature as soon as I found out about it, tested and fixed the issues I had with it and also showed I am concerend about not being able to support this new feature when my shared users have to pay for it just makes your assumed statement about me more like an attack than constructive criticism.

Finally, if I could give you some advice. From now and in the future please refrain from replying to posts where you are not able to provide positive and helpful responses. Making assumptions and attacking those who you perceive as not confirming to you own ideals does not make this community any better and potentially loses you any respect that the community member you are replying to may have afforded you.

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I’m not going to sit here and try to dissect your whiny and entitled post. You basically spent all that time typing that out to say that your lazy and do not want to have to do anything to maintain your server or users. Also that you expect Plex to provide everything to your users for free if you pay for YOUR Plex Pass. Plex Pass is not server specific it is user specific and always has been. If you read what I posted and interpreted it the way your did then you are a lost cause anyway. I’m going to ignore your posts from now on, not because you think you can tell people not to, but because your irrational ridiculous behavior and entitled arguments are not worth the time to deal with. Have a good time in the corner of these forums that everyone choses to ignore, because the reality is, you sir are the one who is not productive and toxic, hence why no one wants to participate in the conversations with you.

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This thread is going nowhere so I’m closing it before it gets out of hand.

If anyone has specific technical issues with Downloads, please create a new post or add to an already existing one.