I never enabled the new Downloads feature, and yet I had a mix of Sync and Downloaded content on my iPad from years of “transferring” files to my iPad (I use “transferring” because I don’t want to confuse Sync/Download, but I’m 100% certain all of these came down with me pressing a button labeled “Sync” — Maybe at some point some version of Plex moved a bunch of stuff from Sync to Downloaded? Anyway, I digress).
Today, things were a mess, so I deleted the Plex app and started again, this time enabling the new Downloads feature. I queued up 20 moves and they all transcoded and transferred and were in my library. And when I put my iPad in Airplane mode (Wi-Fi off) to test, 2 of them would play! The other 18 would act like they were gonna play, but all I would get was the player screen with a dimmed-out poster of the movie in the middle and a spinning wheel.
So I removed everything and tried again. Same thing.
Now I’m back to the “old” way, and yet again, I’m getting half in Synced and half in Downloaded. I have no idea what’s going on anymore, and I’m hearing the same thing from people in my house.
Is this no longer a reliable feature? Is anyone else actually having success here? I hope so… because I’m hoping it’s just me (or the way I have my Server configured) and there’s a solution before I get on airplanes over the next week.
That is the name of the old Local library for the old Sync method. When you opt in to Downloads, there will be a new local library called “Downloads”. If you deleted all the old Sync files that “Sync and Download” Library will not appear.
If you are just removing the app without telling it to delete all sync content before, it is possible that when reinstalling the app, it got the sync information from your server and started re-“Syncing” those files before you switched over to Downloads. I’ve seen reports that this can cause issues but I haven’t confirmed it yet.
Try the following:
opt-out of Downloads and go back to Sync
from the Sync and Downloads library, find the option to delete all content
So, I’m finally trying this as I have another trip coming up in a few weeks. I’m running the Plex beta, if that matters, but I followed these steps and definitely found a ton of content when I went back to sync. I confirmed that it’s there by playing some items when in Airplane mode.
But it won’t let me delete any of it. Whether I choose “Delete All Content” or individually remove, it never actually deletes things. I confirm the deletion dialog, but…nothing happens and the content remains.
Thanks, @anon18523487 — Things have evolved in the past two days. I was able to get both attempted devices to at least appear to have deleted everything.
From there, I moved on to enabling the “new” downloads and then attempting to Download things, and this is where I’m continuing to run into a LOT of trouble.
I’ve attached logs from the two iPads which are failing with most downloads, as well as server logs from right after the most recent attempts with both.
My gut says that the server is still somehow remembering old syncs (or something else) and just munging things up, but… honestly, I have no idea.
Perhaps helpful, perhaps not… If I go into Server Web Interface > Settings > Status > Sync I see multiple versions of the same problematic devices (Dave’s iPad mini 6 and Lisa’a Retina iPad mini 2).
Perhaps years (a decade-plus?) of Syncing has tied things in knots? Is there a way to say, “please just forget the past”? I feel like even the “old” Syncing engine was not the first offline-media-on-iOS/iPadOS engine to be used, right? If so, maybe THAT is also contributing to the issue? I dunno. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ But it is frustrating, of course, and I’m really hoping you’ll have an answer for me this week ahead of my trip on Saturday.
Ok, I finally see the error. I’m not sure what is causing it yet, but at least I see where it is stopping. So it looks like the app is requesting a direct download of the file (i.e. no transcode), but it got back something else.
Can you send me your PMS logs? I’m hoping it still has this request and I can see if something happened on the server end.
I do see a bunch of networking errors too. Do you happen to have something else installed on your network that may be intercepting the calls? A proxy, firewall, internet security thing, etc.
I was just testing something else, and requesting it to transcode (or not) via the Downloads settings is definitely a factor. It’s like it won’t transcode some things, but will download direct.
Odd that you’re seeing it request a direct download in those previous logs. Both of those drives were set to a maximum quality level.
As for networking stuff, this is all happening on the local network, so firewalls shouldn’t be an issue, right?
You don’t have debug logging enabled in your server settings, so the logs are not very useful. I do see 1 message at about the time when the Download attempt was made. It refers to a subtitle file that could not be found. It appears to be one that was automatically downloaded via OpenSubtitles. So PMS still thinks the file is there but can’t find it when it tries to find it. This is preventing the Download from occurring. Can you turn off the OpenSubtitle agent, then Plex Dance that movie and try again?
If that works, you may have the same issue for your other movies. You can try doing the same for some other movies to test. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy fix for this. Recreating your library would be the fastest fix. Or you could try upgrading the library to the new Plex Movie agent. That doesn’t use OpenSubtitles so it should remove all that extra missing subtitle info.
The movie in question has no subtitle file (you’re right) and, to my knowledge, never did. There’s nothing in its folder, and that folder hasn’t been updated in years.
Plex seems to think it does have a subtitle, as evidenced by this. Choosing to delete it yielded nothing. That’s not surprising because there was nothing to delete:
Doing a simple “Refresh Metadata” on the movie solved this problem by both removing any reference to a non-existent subtitle file and allowing it to Download with transcoding. I tried this with a second movie and it, too, worked, even without removing-and-readding it to the queue.
So there are a few issues here, and then I have a question.
This movie (and maybe others?) would happily “Download” if audio and video quality were set to “Original”, but would fail if video quality was changed to require a transcode. Whatever the issue is (subtitle, etc) seems to only fail if it’s not “Original”.
This movie (and all the others) successfully would “Sync” with-or-without-transcoding over the years.
So it seems the Download engine doesn’t deal with transcoding SRT-related anomalies as well as the Sync engine.
It also seems like the Plex Movie agent does get affected by OpenSubtitles, or at the very least the upgrade to the new Plex Movie agent doesn’t remove all that extra missing subtitle info (or, perhaps more accurately: it didn’t back when I did it originally… maybe it deals with that better today?).
My question: how would you recommend I solve this for my library? Obviously telling my whole library to “Refresh Metadata” without me being there to check every change could result in disaster, so I don’t think we wanna do that. I certainly could do this movie-by-movie, though that seems tedious. Is there a way to tell it “yeah, let’s really be done with whatever you think you have from OpenSubtitles nowadays”?
and another, also with debug on, but after I went through the Refresh Metadata process on the first movie and then began the successful transcode-and-download: Plex Media Server Logs_2021-11-16_07-28-05.zip (1.8 MB)
I think you change the agent to the new one, but you never did a full refresh of the entire library which is needed. Just changing the agent does not refresh current movies you already had. Your logs showed that movie was still matched using the old agent.
Doing a simple “Refresh Metadata” on the movie solved this problem
That updated the matching to use the new agent, and also removed the subtitle.
Whatever the issue is (subtitle, etc) seems to only fail if it’s not “Original”.
PMS was trying to process the external subtitle so it could be included in the download and failing. On original, it doesn’t process the file, just a straight download so a missing subtitle file is just ignored.
This movie (and all the others) successfully would “Sync”
The old Sync didn’t work with external subtitle files (except to burn them in) so not having one would just get ignored and not fail. The processing for Download appears to be a bit more sensitive. It should also ignore it but likely we missed something. I’ve made a note to get this looked at.
My question: how would you recommend I solve this for my library? Obviously telling my whole library to “Refresh Metadata” without me being there to check every change could result in disaster, so I don’t think we wanna do that.
You’ll need to do that if you do want all your content matched using the new agent. I’m guessing that if you didn’t do this in the beginning, you have a lot of old movies that still use the old agent.
Is there a way to tell it “yeah, let’s really be done with whatever you think you have from OpenSubtitles nowadays”?
I do have some recollection of doing the change and it feeling like a migration of sorts. It definitely did “something” which took a period of time, and I presumed that was the end of it. Anyway…clearly it didn’t do whatever it needed to do, and now I’m dealing with the aftermath (it wouldn’t surprise me if lots of other folks are, too).
So … it sounds like I really do need to go to [Movies] > Manage Library > Refresh All Metadata, is that correct? Or is there more to do?
And, while I know there are no crystal balls, is there anything you think I should be on the lookout for after I do this?
