I have a lot of movies with two versions, one in 4K and one in 1080p.
I tried today to download one of these movies on my phone. The problem is I can’t choose the version I want to download. If I press the download button it will immediately begin to download the 4K version. Which is not something I want because the 4K file is huge.
I then went to Settings – Downloads – Video Quality, and selected “1080p HD (High) 20Mbps”.
But when I tried to download the movie after modifying the setting, it started doing a transcode of the 4K file (maybe because the 1080p file I have is more than 20Mbps?) But that’s not what I want, I just want to download the existing 1080p version, I don’t want a transcode of the 4K file.
How can I achieve my goal of downloading the 1080p version of the movie to my iOS phone?
Is choosing a specific version when downloading a movie to a client really impossible? It seems to me it would be a huge oversight if that’s the case. If it really is impossible right now, are there plans to add this (important) feature eventually?
Afaik it should decide to get the 1080p version if that is what is selected in quality. i think the caveat to that is if it the device is HDR capable it will use whichever file is HDR, but the bitrate is likely affecting decision as well
@BigWheel, I was doing a few things to try to make it work, and I think it starts to transcode because of the selected subtitles format. Is it possible? I had an external .ass subtitles file selected when I attempted to download the movie. Can it make a difference?
In any case, I completely turned off the subtitles for the movie and attempted to download it again from one of my iOS devices. But this time it says “Error downloading this item”.
I’ll send you a new round of logs by PM. Let me know once you had the chance to look at them.
Unfortunately yes. Unlike the steaming feature of “Play version”, there isn’t an equivalent for Downloads. This is something that’s been discussed as a future enhancement, but no news on when/if that will happen.
But this time it says “Error downloading this item”.
Downloads will attempt to include the subtitle so you can enable it later if you want. It’s possible the subtitle file couldn’t be found if you have 2 versions of the video. Can you post or PM me the XML info for that movie?
In light of these problems with the Downloads functionality and other problems I also had in the past with movies that have multiple versions, I decided to “split apart” all the movies in my library.
It’s not great, but at least it makes the Downloads functionality work without errors and without unexpected transcoding. I can now also download the exact version I want.
But there are two inconveniences with this solution:
My library is now full of duplicated movie entries.
The split functionality doesn’t work with extras when both movie files are in the same folder. The extras just aren’t detected at all after the split. So for all the movies with extras I needed to split, I had to put one of the movie files in its own separate folder, along with a second copy of all the extras. So this solution is taking more storage than before.
@BigWheel and @anon18523487, thanks for your help. If you need further information to help investigate and solve the problems highlighted in this thread, please don’t hesitate to ask.
I would also like to stress how important and how badly needed a better way to manage multiple versions of the same movie is in Plex. And such a solution would need to also take the Downloads and movie extras functionalities into account. I really hope this is something that has a high priority for future development.
