Server Version#: 1.24.2.4973 (Linux)
Player Version#: 7.22 7.23 (iPad)
A few issues I’ve found with downloads:
Major issue (breaks downloads entirely): If “Automatically Adjust Quality” is enabled, downloads simply aren’t used. If you’re online, it will attempt to stream from the server even when a local download is available. This is despite having “Prefer Downloaded Content” enabled.
Edit: Ah, patch logs suggest this was fixed in the latest version. I thought I was fully up-to-date, but I wasn’t.
Minor issue (but a big annoyance): Downloads do not respect the “Auto Play” setting. I have this disabled both in the global settings, and in the “Playback Settings” dialog. Yet whenever I’m watching a downloaded TV show, it immediately begins the next episode when the current episode ends. The impact of this ranges from just a minor annoyance, to actually rendering the app unsuitable for use in some cases — e.g. if I wanted to listen to one episode of a show while going to bed, I can’t, because it’ll just keep playing episodes all night long and there’s no way to make it automatically stop.
(Incidentally, a “sleep timer” feature would also be useful in general. I’ve gotten around this previously by setting the TV itself to sleep after a certain amount of time, which also turns off my AppleTV and thus stops Plex. I don’t have that luxury when it’s just my iPad playing the media, though.)
Missing feature (suggestion): Please give us some easy ability to pause downloads. As an example of why this is needed: I watched a few episodes of a downloaded show on the flight to my destination, then got on hotel wifi and decided to watch something I didn’t have downloaded. The wifi is only good enough to stream at a moderate quality, but because that downloaded show is set to “download next 5 unwatched episodes”, it’s hogging all the bandwidth and I can’t watch (or I would have to pick a terrible quality). There’s no obvious way to stop it doing that except to delete the download entirely.
—
Overall, there’s definitely been some frustrations with the new Downloads functionality, but I guess that’s to be expected with a new feature still in testing. Obviously I can avoid the first one now that I know the problem (albeit at the cost of not being able to try out the “Automatically Adjust Quality” option), but the other two are pretty annoying, and I’d love to see them addressed. Thanks!
