Hi,
When you choose an entire TV series or a season of a TV show to sync, it allows you to limit how many episodes it syncs by:
1. No limit
2. By # of episodes
3. By duration
What I am interested in it being able to do is limit by the amount of size those episodes would take up on my device - so if I want a maximum of 1.5GB of my iPad's space to be taken up by Archer episodes, I don't want to have to guess how many episodes that would be after transcoding.
I imagine this would most easily be accomplished by having the server transcode one episode at a time until it reached the specified limit:
"E01: 0.4GB, E02: 0.4GB, E03: 0.4GB, I should stop" or "E01: 0.4GB, E02: 0.4GB, E03: 0.4GB, E04: 0.4GB, I'll save this one for later and sync E01-03"
In the iPad/iPhone app,
Settings > Sync > Storage Limit
Allows you to control how much data is kept locally on the device.
You may also specify default sync quality.
Yes, but if I can specify size per synced show I can make sure I have 1.5GB of Archer, 1GB of Modern Family, and 2GB of Dexter, for example. All this could fit within/be limited by a device maximum specified separately.
You do realize that conflict resolution is still going to fall back on you as a fully manual operation?
Example:
Set at device:
10 GiB device maximum
Requested by you:
6 GiB maximum for Movies
5 GiB maximum for TV Series A.
Until the next Sync operation, Plex has no idea the device has less space available then what you requested.
How should this conflict be resolved? Blindly download until error, arbitrarily ignore certain content, or refuse to download any content? What of content already on the device?
Plex currently will sync until the device hits the local limit.
At that point, you must manually remove content.
Suppose I used the current scheme and asked it to sync 3 episodes of show A, 3 of show B, and 3 of show C. What will it do if this exceeds the cap I set on the device? What it the device does't have room even if it's under my cap? This problem already exists, and is a fundamental 'problem' of syncing to a device with finite and fluctuant available space.
The feature I suggest simply generates a dynamic # of episodes to be synced, so if there were for example a double length christmas special it would know to sync one less episode, as the file size of the special would be around twice that of a normal episode. More than that, if I set the quality to medium, perhaps I could fit more episodes, but because I don't know how small they will be after transcoding, I don't know how many to choose.
I agree, the problem does exist in another form already.
Even Plex will not know if the video will fit until after it's transcoded. There are too many variables for a guaranteed solution unless 'Current + raw source < limit'.
How would an 'estimated' amount be or perhaps Plex can display actual size and Sync'd size? This would give a better rough estimate based on quality settings prior to actually transcoding in addition to showing what the usage and limit was at last device sync?
I've been pondering myself what to request of the Dev team.
Being able to predict a post-transcode file size for a given quality would be a start, but that would be most helpful when transcoding one item, like a movie. My point is that when syncing a list of items (like a TV show) each one will be different - not only in length but individual file quality and container. If I'm syncing only unwatched and I get to the point where I'm moving from S01 to S02 and my source files for S02 are iPod rips, I'll be able to store 8 for each 720p episode I had from S01.
I still like my idea of being able to specify total post-transcode file size by individual sync subscription, but I also think you're right that being able to predict post-transcode size is the foundation of making this work, and has lots of other potential utility as well.
That’s a lot to ask for as the entire ‘subscription sync transaction’ success or failure may fail at the very last video. What does it do then? Fail out completely and ignore all others queued after it or does it wipe out what it just attempted and move to the next ‘batch’? The problem is still the same.
To further complicate it, what of media already on the device which has been watched? Wipe it?
Yes, it’s a big management and priority resolution task needing a lot more flushing out.
Sent with Tapatalk
Well, if you're using the 'unwatched' feature, then yes - it wipes watched content. It does that already.
Again, how does it handle failures now? If I tell it so sync '4 unwatched episodes' and one fails what does it do? In my experience it throws up an error and omits it (and the only way I've found to fix this is delete the sync subscription and start a new, identical, one). This is a whole separate and existing issue.
This feature request would't address any of these already existing issues, and it shouldn't serve to complicate them either.
