For the last couple of years, it really felt like you all finally got it all dialed in, and I have been really happy with plex. Downloads is a huge step back from what sync had. I am at a Sales Engineer summit right now, and I keep hearing conversations about it. I have tried to have an open mind, and forced myself to use it thinking I’d get used to it, and be happy with it, but I am not, and I am not alone. As many of my teammates are getting on the road again for the first time post covid, this is a common theme.
The first problem is that it won’t sync without being the foreground application. I know many business travelers that use it to sync episodes etc while we are traveling. We have various systems that automatically download new episodes when they come out into the media folder of our plex server. Sync would automatically download the episodes in the background once the server got the new episodes so they were ready on the plane. Now, if you’re using your device for anything else, nothing downloads.
Loosing the ability to choose what gets synced onto each device from the website on our computer is a drag too. It was way easier to choose what to take with me before a trip on a nice big screen and mouse on my computer instead of having to use my tablet or chromebook to choose what is downloaded. Coupled with the earlier feature that is now missing, as long as my tablet or chromebook was online and on the media would automatically download…
Downloads gets hung up saying things like “1 items could not be downloaded. Swipe to remove or tap to retry” Swiping isn’t an option on a Chromebook without a touchscreen. This seems to happen when it’s trying to download and episode while you go in and mark the episode as watched. Or maybe it’s when the server crashes and gets restarted…I just updated the server because of occasional crashes, so that could be a factor…
The downloads folder constantly resets to sort by name. Every time I go into the downloads folder I have to reset to sort by download date.
Having downloads able to bring over a file without transcoding isn’t exciting, as if we are running the server on a machine with any horsepower at all, and want to speed up the download when we are on the road, or save space on the device, are transcoding it anyway. No real point to have a 4K version of something on a tablet with a 1080p screen.
P.S. The changes you made to how the media library detects what media is are brilliant. I never have to fix matches anymore.
