How to sync or download locally to Mac?

General Discussions
1

Hi,
I love Plex.
my Plex Media Server can be accessed and synced via my windows PCs, android phones, and iPhones.
However, somehow I can’t seem to sync to Mac!
I tried Web access then downloading the PMP.
It shows up on the device list but still cannot sync.
Of course, I can stream it but no local sync.
Why?
Please help. (I do have Plex Pass)

Thanks,
MT

2

Sync only works to mobile devices (tablets, phones), and not desktop or laptop devices, I’m afraid!

3

@DaveBinM Thank you! The biggest question is “why not?” :disappointed:
I like how I can sync to my Windows laptops on the go…

4

You can try BlueStacks (Android emulator) https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1324698/#Comment_1324698 But I didn’t test it. It could have playback problems due to emulation, but there are success reports.
Or you can install a Win10 virtual machine on your Mac, but that requires more space and effort.

If you have wi-fi (but with bad or no internet), you can sync to your phone (not sure if iOS only), then switch in the phone from server to local (synced) content, and then cast to the mac client. Supposedly if they are on one network, it won’t be streamed from the server over the internet, but from the phone over the LAN wi-fi.
I’ve heard creating a private network on Mac and joining it from the phone works too, so supposedly you don’t even need wi-fi network to begin with, but I don’t have a Mac so I can’t test it. How to Create and Use an Ad Hoc Network on Your Mac

If you are the Plex server owner, you can just login to web (or web mode in PMP) with server owner account and choose Download from context menu - it will just download the file, you’ll have to play it in another player.

Or you can share files from you server on the network, and copy multiple files at once to your Mac.

Another way is to setup a local (duplicate) server on Mac, setup any cloud sync of selected videos from your server to that Mac, and maybe also use this to sync watched states GitHub - jacobwgillespie/plex-sync: 🎬 Command line utility for synchronizing Plex Media Server watched / seen status between multiple servers
But it feels like a lot of work. I wish there was a way to sync on PMP just as easy as on mobile. There are bugs on Win10 client, it often crashes and often transcodes when PMP doesn’t.

UPD: Also just found this:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/115593/beta-plex-downloader-desktop-sync/p1
Not sure if still works, of how it even worked in the first place.

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