I purchased Plex Pass to watch videos offline on an overseas trip - a use case specifically called out on the Plex Pass page - and the end result is a joke.
I was able to download the videos to my Pixel tablet mostly seamlessly, but even that wasn’t completely smooth: I had to force kill the app, clear the cache, and resume the downloads to get them to finish.
Once I tried playing the videos, that’s when the problems began. First, playing a video results in the cryptic “external storage not found” error that others have posted about. After googling that error, I realized I had to install VLC and enable the external player, which of course isn’t documented anywhere. This is already annoying, and now my playback positions aren’t being saved. Contrast this with Netflix downloads, which do remember your playback position without any extra hoops.
Here’s the worst part though: playback through VLC doesn’t work for more than a minute or two when I’m offline. Playback will freeze after 1-2 minutes and I have to exit playback and then resume. This is unacceptable. If I try playing a video while online, playback works fine, so it seems the Plex app itself is trying to reach the Internet during playback and freezing when it fails to do so.
All in all, I’ll be cancelling my Plex Pass immediately. Plex works great on my TV at home, but it’s awful in an offline mobile scenario.
