Storage Limit slider -> Shows current free space and not total space of external SD card.
Sync status percentage -> “Syncs” with no video i.e. sync on deck video but currently have no on deck video.
Status will always be “pending” even though there is no video in the sync. This sync will never move down to synced item section causing the percentage to always not be 100% unless these empty syncs are deleted.
Sync 2.0 bugs:
Editing sync item limit of any sync (i.e. increasing the limit) would cause all videos to be deleted and no video would be transcoded/synced. This can only be resolved by editing the sync (i.e. changing sync limit) on plex web or recreating the sync.
While syncing, android may say that the app is not responding and ask if we would like to force close the app. Force closing the app would result in user being logged out of the app and all synced items deleted.
Upgrading from version 4.X to 5.0 cause all existing items synced in 4.X to be undetected. The various syncs shows up in synced items but in sync setting, it will show something like 0 GB in use.
This is related to issue #3 above, syncs created on 4.X would be stuck on “waiting to be downloaded” status. After syncing all videos in syncs created after 5.0 was installed, sync status will alternates between “downloading”, “queued” and “waiting to be downloaded” but converted videos in syncs created pre 5.0 will never be downloaded.
Suggestions:
Display disk space used by various synced items like in version 4.X
Enable options to sync on app open like in version 4.X
Thanks for the feedback and sorry for not a addressing it earlier.
Storage Limit slider → Shows current free space and not total space of external SD card.
That’s actually by design. The iOS app has had that behavior for over a year now and there haven’t been any major complaints, so we thought it didn’t make sense to do things differently.
Sync status percentage → “Syncs” with no video i.e. sync on deck video but currently have no on deck video.
That’s an interesting scenario, we’ll take a look and make sure we deal with it in a better manner.
Editing sync item limit of any sync (i.e. increasing the limit) would cause all videos to be deleted and no video would be transcoded/synced. This can only be resolved by editing the sync (i.e. changing sync limit) on plex web or recreating the sync.
The fact that changing the limit requires the sync item to be recreated is a known limitation. However I was not aware that changing the limit in Plex Web would leave to different (better) behavior. We’ll take a look.
Regarding the problems with migrating Sync v1 content, we’ve run quite a few tests ourselves and they were successful, suggesting that the migration works most of the time. We’ve also received reports about things not working that well for some users though, but have been unable to get to the bottom of things yet. We’ll keep digging.
Oh, and thanks for the suggestions. Regarding the one about syncing automatically when the app opens, what we do right now is that we sync from a server as soon as it becomes reachable. Since that happens when the app is opened (as we test the reachability of all servers at that point), I think the scenario you suggest is one that should already be covered by the current implementation.
As to your second suggestion, I agree that it’s useful information. We’ll definitely consider adding it in the future.
@ManuelPG said:
Thanks for the feedback and sorry for not a addressing it earlier.
Storage Limit slider → Shows current free space and not total space of external SD card.
That’s actually by design. The iOS app has had that behavior for over a year now and there haven’t been any major complaints, so we thought it didn’t make sense to do things differently.
Well here is one disadvantage to this scenario. Say I have 10gb/32gb of “free” space now. I am able to designate 10gb for plex. I perform some syncing and synced ~8gb of videos to it. So now plex has “2gb/10gb” free and my system also have “2gb/32gb” free. If I were to free up some space on my system (outside of plex) I would be unable to use it in plex. Say if I delete 6gb from my system, I will have 8gb/32gb of free space (6gb + 2gb that was free initially). However I would be unable to increase the storage limit that can be used by plex as 8gb of free space is less than the 10gb that was initially assigned. So now, even though I have 6gb of extra free space outside of plex, I cannot utilize them due to me not being able to increase the slider past 10gb i.e. I want to use 10gb of initial free space + 6 gb of extra free space to have a total of 16gb for plex.
A simpler example might be
0) have 10gb of free space on device.
sync 10gb of files to plex.
sync 10gb worth of files to plex → device have 0gb of free space now.
free up some space outside of plex. → say we delete a 5gb file, we now have 5gb free space on device
we should now be able to assign “15gb” to plex but slider stills limit to “10gb” as free space is less than “10gb”.
This issue was not present in sync 4.X as it showed the total space of the external SD card.
Sync status percentage → “Syncs” with no video i.e. sync on deck video but currently have no on deck video.
That’s an interesting scenario, we’ll take a look and make sure we deal with it in a better manner.
Editing sync item limit of any sync (i.e. increasing the limit) would cause all videos to be deleted and no video would be transcoded/synced. This can only be resolved by editing the sync (i.e. changing sync limit) on plex web or recreating the sync.
The fact that changing the limit requires the sync item to be recreated is a known limitation. However I was not aware that changing the limit in Plex Web would leave to different (better) behavior. We’ll take a look.
I was perhaps unclear in my description. “Editing sync item limit of any sync” ON the device results in ALL videos being deleted from the device for that sync even if we increased the sync limit. This is counter to what happens on sync 4.X where if we increase the sync limit, new files would just be synced down. “Editing sync item limit of any sync” ON the WEB would result in the same behavior where new files would just be synced down.
@ManuelPG said:
Thanks for the feedback and sorry for not a addressing it earlier.
Storage Limit slider → Shows current free space and not total space of external SD card.
That’s actually by design. The iOS app has had that behavior for over a year now and there haven’t been any major complaints, so we thought it didn’t make sense to do things differently.
Well here is one disadvantage to this scenario. Say I have 10gb/32gb of “free” space now. I am able to designate 10gb for plex. I perform some syncing and synced ~8gb of videos to it. So now plex has “2gb/10gb” free and my system also have “2gb/32gb” free. If I were to free up some space on my system (outside of plex) I would be unable to use it in plex. Say if I delete 6gb from my system, I will have 8gb/32gb of free space (6gb + 2gb that was free initially). However I would be unable to increase the storage limit that can be used by plex as 8gb of free space is less than the 10gb that was initially assigned. So now, even though I have 6gb of extra free space outside of plex, I cannot utilize them due to me not being able to increase the slider past 10gb i.e. I want to use 10gb of initial free space + 6 gb of extra free space to have a total of 16gb for plex.
A simpler example might be
0) have 10gb of free space on device.
sync 10gb of files to plex.
sync 10gb worth of files to plex → device have 0gb of free space now.
free up some space outside of plex. → say we delete a 5gb file, we now have 5gb free space on device
we should now be able to assign “15gb” to plex but slider stills limit to “10gb” as free space is less than “10gb”.
This issue was not present in sync 4.X as it showed the total space of the external SD card.
@ManuelPG this post should be related to the scenario described above.
So now, even though I have 6gb of extra free space outside of plex, I cannot utilize them due to me not being able to increase the slider past 10gb
But that would be a bug, right? The upper limit of the slider should be the amount of free space, which in the scenario you’ve described would be 6 GB after you’ve freed that space up.
(Just to be precise, the slider shows the “maximum space used by Sync”, so in that scenario it would actually have an upper limit of 16GB, which corresponds to 10GB that are already used plus 6GB that are free on the device).
Anyway, I’ll make a quick test for the scenario you describe and see if the app does the right thing. Thanks for the feedback.
Just checked and deleting files on the device causes the upper limit on the slider to increase, as expected. So no bug there.
Having said that, it’s true that if you run out of space during a sync operation (to the point that the “Cannot sync: not enough storage” error message is shown), then freeing up space won’t allow you to get rid of the error. So that’s a bug, and it’s already been reported in the thread linked above by @afoongwl215 (thanks). But to the best of my knowledge it’s not a problem affecting the “storage limit” slider.
@ManuelPG said:
Just checked and deleting files on the device causes the upper limit on the slider to increase, as expected. So no bug there.
Having said that, it’s true that if you run out of space during a sync operation (to the point that the “Cannot sync: not enough storage” error message is shown), then freeing up space won’t allow you to get rid of the error. So that’s a bug, and it’s already been reported in the thread linked above by @anf (thanks). But to the best of my knowledge it’s not a problem affecting the “storage limit” slider.
I did a check and this issue seems to be gone in version 5.1.0.68 (d02203bc). I was able to increase my storage limit.
Oh, and thanks for the suggestions. Regarding the one about syncing automatically when the app opens, what we do right now is that we sync from a server as soon as it becomes reachable. Since that happens when the app is opened (as we test the reachability of all servers at that point), I think the scenario you suggest is one that should already be covered by the current implementation.
One behavior I noticed is that reachability to the server is not always checked when the app is opened from the background. I would still need to manually initiate the sync after launching it when it is alive in the background. Previously in 4.X, it would always sync when the app is loaded no matter if it was running in the background or totally closed.
Just to be clear, is this the scenario you have in mind?
App in foreground, can’t sync because server unreachable.
App sent to background.
Server becomes reachable.
App sent to foreground (wasn’t killed by the system while in the background.)
In that case then it’s true that a sync operation would not be triggered automatically, you would have to either open the location picker on the home screen (which triggers a reachability test for all “known” servers) or tap the “refresh” button in the sync status screen. This is the intended behaviour though, the app being in the background and then sent back to the foreground being so common in Android that we think it’s too costly to perform a reachability test (or start a sync operation) each time it happens.
If that worked differently in the previous version of Sync (can’t tell off the top of my head) then I would consider it something that’s been changed intentionally.
@ManuelPG said:
Just to be clear, is this the scenario you have in mind?
This is the scenario that I have in mind.
App in foreground, server is reachable, synced.
App sent to background.
Wait a few hours.
App sent to foreground (wasn’t killed by the system while in the background.)
This is the intended behaviour though, the app being in the background and then sent back to the foreground being so common in Android that we think it’s too costly to perform a reachability test (or start a sync operation) each time it happens.
If that worked differently in the previous version of Sync (can’t tell off the top of my head) then I would consider it something that’s been changed intentionally.
In the old version there is an option for it to always sync when the app gets sent to the foreground. Perhaps adding a check for last reachability test when the app is sent to the foreground and if it surpasses some threshold perhaps 10 min? then it will perform the test/sync again.
Perhaps adding a check for last reachability test when the app is sent to the foreground and if it surpasses some threshold perhaps 10 min
Thanks for the suggestion. But in fact that would not work in this particular scenario, because the app still thinks the server is reachable, so a sync operation would not be triggered (there needs to be an unreachable => reachable transition). What would work though is if we applied something similar to what you suggest, and trigger a sync operation when the app is brought back the foreground after having been in the background for several minutes.
Keep in mind though that the app receives a push notification when something related to sync changes, so if you (say) add and item to Sync using Plex Web, the app would quickly be notified and start a sync operation to fetch the new item. There are of course scenarios where the push notification doesn’t help (for example if you’ve added a section to sync with “only unwatched” enabled, and the “watched” status of some of the items in the section changes, no notification is sent even though a sync operation would result in the client fetching new items). But the push notification should be enough to cover most common scenarios (unless you have an Amazon device, of course).
Keep in mind though that the app receives a push notification when something related to sync changes, so if you (say) add and item to Sync using Plex Web, the app would quickly be notified and start a sync operation to fetch the new item.
Could you perhaps explain what constitute a sync change? Push notification for syncing doesn’t seem to work on my device.
There are of course scenarios where the push notification doesn’t help (for example if you’ve added a section to sync with “only unwatched” enabled, and the “watched” status of some of the items in the section changes, no notification is sent even though a sync operation would result in the client fetching new items). But the push notification should be enough to cover most common scenarios (unless you have an Amazon device, of course).
Here are the two category of syncs that I have configured. It seems that they all fall under scenarios where push doesn’t work. Could you verify if that is true?
Sync on deck
Sync X no of unwatched item in section/show/playlist
My key usecase for plex on my mobile device is to consume unwatch media when I am on the go. I use another client to consume media at home.
Could you perhaps explain what constitute a sync change?
Adding an item to sync or removing an existing one, that’s basically it.
My key usecase for plex on my mobile device is to consume unwatch media
That wouldn’t be covered by our existing push notifications because no item is added or removed, it’s just an existing item that changes as episodes are watched.
So yeah, in that scenario you’ll need to sync manually if the app is not killed by the system while in the background. And yeah, in that case an approach similar to the one you described (triggering a sync operation when the app is brought back to the foreground after more than, say, 10 minutes) would definitely fit your needs.
I’ll make sure that possibility is discussed internally, but can’t make no guarantees about whether it will be eventually implemented. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
