Server Version#: 1.40.4.8679
Player Version#: 8.37
I haven’t had to download media on the iPad for a while, and last night at 8pm I thought, hey “I should download a couple of episodes for a long day of travel tomorrow”. I started the download at 8:15 pm. At 4:55am, I had gotten exactly 45% of a single movie. Needless to say I have no media on my device right now.
How is this still a problem after dozens of tickets and years of supposed work on this feature? I
I was able to download all 4 seasons of a TV series onto my iPad in under an hour just a couple of weeks ago.
I recommend you to keep the Downloads tab of the Plex app open while downloads are in progress. This is supposed to prevent the Plex app from getting backgrounded and paused (read: “choked”) by iOS.
If downloads require transcoding, this can take very long time (depending on the source file and the power of the server hardware of course).
Because of that, it is best to plug in the charger.
Key thing is to check if your media is getting transcoded prior to download, this can take significantly long periods of time if you have HEVC/X265 media sources.
You also need to ensure that you have the right settings on your Plex iOS/iPadOS client, look under downloads to make sure the following are configured:
Video Quality = Original
Audio Quality = Original
Download Format = Original
I’m not sure if other things might force transcode, for example specific types of audio that Plex client can’t play.
For me, I gave up on the Plex Client a while ago (mainly because of crashing, but also download speeds) so I moved to Infuse, that doesn’t have this issue, downloads are always at full network speed.
I’ll look into InFuse, as it’s been a while. Good tips, I think I’ve done them all but I’ll check.
The solution was to use InFuse, which is a ridiculous solution, but I was able to download 8 episodes in about 5 minutes.
Sadly Plex is starting to feel like abandonware these days…that these long term issues exist (after 10+ years) is frankly embarrassing. The only reason I purchased my PlexPass was for downloads, and I’ve never had a reasonable experience (from sync to download).
For me, I can’t even get the iPad app to run for a day or two without crashing, but that is another thread.
Plex - come on, are you still here, are you listening, do you actually care about core user experience at all?
How much free space do you have in your transcode temporary folder? If you have to transcode the video, it will need all of the free space to accommodate the media size after transcoding. It can fail if it runs out of space.
I am telling the client to use Original for downloads. I don’t have any files in any codecs that can’t be played natively. Still, I have plenty of space in the transcoding folder, several hundred GBs.
Slightly off-topic…Why do you have hundreds of gigs assigned to temp transcoding? May not be the cause of your issues but this already sounds suboptimal.
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