Downloads broken and Sync now disabled

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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Edit: Given that I have discovered that downloads to a Mac running Catalina work, and it’s only downloads to all my iOS devices that don’t work, I’m moving this to “iOS”.

Server Version#: 1.24.5.5173 64 bit on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Player Version#:Latest iOS on iPadOs 15.0.2 ish

I excitedly turned to “downloads” when it became available. But after a couple of weeks, it stopped downloading so just shrugged and went back to sync. It was in beta after all, I presumed you’d fix the issue before releasing it.

Today I have discovered that sync’s been disabled, and I MUST go to downloads, except… they still don’t work.

I can’t download anything, not a single song on its own, not a single film.

The iOS app just shows Downloading… with no activity in the circle around the arrow on the RHS of the page. This affects all my iOS devices, both iPads and iPhones (all on latest O/S).

The Linux server shows minimal activity on htop.

How on earth can I debug and fix this?

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Edit: I downloaded Plex for Mac 1.35.1.2632-c6783c78 - which also has the downloads feature - and it works perfectly there.

2 Likes
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Try to download something new onto your iOS device, wait for the error. Grab both the iOS log and your server logs. Post them here.

Edit - Sync is not disabled. You can use one or the other, you just change the option in the settings.

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Thanks. Here’s what I did:
At 08:01:00 (as close as I could manage I put in a request on my iPad to download “Columbiana (2011)”.

At 08:02:00 I switched to the downloads view on my iPad to see how it was doing.

At 08:03:00 I pulled the logs from iPad and server.

I trimmed the logs of everything before today to reduce size for you.

Everything is running on a local network, and Columbiana plays fine directly.

Plex Media Server Logs_2021-10-29_08-03-07.zip (318.1 KB)
PlexDebugInfo-SusanDeath-7.24.1-1350 (2021-10-29 08.03.15 +0100).zip (3.8 MB)

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You don’t have debug logging enabled for your server so there isn’t enough info in there. Can you enable that, restart PMS, wait 3 minutes, then try Downloading that movie again? Get me new logs. Don’t worry about the size of the logs and removing the old info.

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I rebooted the server as you suggested, and put debugging on and Lo! (New) Downloads are working on my iPadpro!

But they’re very slow. Downloading 3 episodes of a TV show, total size 9.9Gb, with no transcoding on the LAN took about an hour, which is about 3MB/s.

Server utilisation (on HTOP) is about 3% of one (of 24) cores.

Then I restarted Plex - to do another test to my iPhoneX - and downloads to my iPadpro are now no longer working! Arg!

I’ve DM’d you a link to the logs from both the iOS device and the Plex Server.

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Is your media saved on a NAS drive? Your logs show the app trying to download a movie but it’s not getting the file from where it is saved. To be clear, Plex is looking for the movie at 192.168.90.13 and not getting anything.

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Yes, the media (and the transcode directories) are on NFS volumes on a server with addresses 192.168.90.202-210.
192.168.90.13 is the management address for a Mikrotik switch; I have no idea why Plex would attempt to download from there.
I will investigate further; for a start, I’ll disconnect that switch as it’s only a bridge to a network that’s not needed.

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I was able to download movies and music to my iOS devices a few weeks ago, but after recently upgrading my Plex installation running on my OpenMediaVault, downloads would just hang. I tried downgrading and couldn’t get the functionality back.

Just a few minutes ago I came across a post from a user on Reddit reporting that they couldn’t download when connected to their home network, but they could from external networks. I turned on a VPN on my phone, opened the Plex app and downloading worked perfectly. I don’t know how to report this problem directly to the dev team, but this info may help someone else on the forum searching for a workaround.

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@volgon Sounds like DNS Rebinding issue. Check your router/firewall.

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@anon18523487 Normally I’d agree, but this issue is new to my network. A few weeks ago, downloading was not a problem. All of my devices (iOS, Windows, Smart TV) are currently able to access and stream from my Plex server, it is only downloading with the Plex app on iOS devices that is a problem. In fact, I just tried downloading music on the iOS PlexAmp app and that worked fine. I would have expected internal network issues to affect both iOS apps, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

My router is a FritzBox and I don’t think there are any user-accessible settings that affect DNS rebinding, but I’ll continue searching. Thanks for the suggestion.

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Yeah, if it is the DNS bug it will only affect Downloads.

I just tried downloading music on the iOS PlexAmp app and that worked fine

That throws a monkey wrench into the situation.

See Update on new Downloads feature. Could be issue 2 or 3. Do either of those seem to fit your situation? I would need to look at your logs after you try downloading something and it fails.

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Unfortunately, it is neither issue 2 (genre ID of 1, 2 or 3 mostly affecting TV shows) or 3 (hidden TV show seasons). The files I’ve tried downloading don’t have those genres and I don’t have any hidden TV show seasons. As an aside, for issue 4 (DNS rebinding), I’ve used both the DNS servers provided by my ISP, but my default is 1.1.1.1. so I feel like that issue could be eliminated as well.

Since this is a known issue already getting attention (Update on new Downloads feature), I don’t want to create additional stress or work for anyone. I am happy to use the VPN workaround for the time being and look forward to a fix in the future.

I sincerely appreciate all your attention. This level of user support is outstanding and highly uncommon these days.

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Huh, isn’t 1.1.1.1 focused on privacy so it may be blocking things. I would try another one just to check.

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1.1.1.1 doesn’t have filtering.

1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3 have filtering.

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Thanks. I wasn’t aware they had separated out their DNSs servers.

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As an update, the downloading issue (for me) has been solved with the latest 7.27 release.

Unfortunately, the application crashes within 2 minutes of startup on any of my IOS devices, so that’s less useful.

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