A quick test of the new downloads feature worked OK, except for playlists. I only seem to be able to download thw whole playlist or not at all.
At the moment, I have a playlist of already watched TV episodes that I’m going through again once a week. I like to sync 1 episode, watch it, remove it from the playlist and Plex autosyncs the next one ready for a week later.
Will downloads be able to do that in the future?
Why not using the mechanism which was invented for this?
If you plan to rewatch a series, mark it as “unwatched”. Then you can restrict the download to “unwatched” episodes.
Two reasons
1: I use my unwatched list to track the content I haven’t actually seen yet. I don’t want to pollute that section with shows that are in the rewatch pile.
2: I use playlists to coordinate my rewatches with other users (on different servers) and sync currently allows that to happen.
My question is whether Downloads will eventually get that degree of control that sync currently has with playlists.
Downloading the whole playlist or none at all doesn’t seem much of a choice.
We have not considered this scenario. Can you provide more details on this? Are you just Syncing the playlist and setting the limit to 1? How did you create the Playlist? Just a dumb list you manually add/remove episodes to? If so, is there a way you could potentially make a smart playlist. That has the function to limit the results. So Downloading the entire playlist would give you the same 1 episode.
So there are two slightly different variations. Both use dumb playlists.
The first is simply a dumb playlist made of a whole season of an already-watched show. I dump the season into a playlist and then sync one episode of it. As I watch an episode, I remove it from the playlist and sync grabs the new next episode.
In the second scenario, I have two or three shows being rewatched across a week. Like my own TV schedule. Show 1 on Sunday, show 2 on Tuesday, show 3 on Friday. I create a dumb playlist from the seasons and interleave the episodes so that they are in the right order for viewing. I then sync three episodes - effectively one of each show - and the playlist keeps me on top of which show and episode is next.
I haven’t really played with smart playlists, so I’d be interested if scenario 1 could be covered by them. I doubt that scenario 2 could be though.
I just assumed that downloads would have the same playlist functionality as sync, to be honest.
There isn’t a way to recreate the same thing. You could get a similar affect but you would need to mark each of these shows as unwatched. You could then just Download each show and set it to the next unwatched, which will grab 1 episode. As you watch that episode, the next episode will automatically download.
And there aren’t any plans to allow the new downloads function to just download part of a playlist?
As mentioned, it was not something that had been considered before. I can’t say either way if it will or will not become a feature. I will bring it up with the team for discussion though.
Thanks for the reply. Seems a shame to lose that functionality.
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