This “feature” has been broken since it replaced sync… YEARS AGO. Honestly, about 2 years. I have given up trying to get it to work. I have tried everything from switching settings on my router, to changing DNS on all my devices (including the server). To pre- transcoding, to trying to download over 5G rather than local WiFi… As you may be able to tell, I’m a bit annoyed at this because this is a feature I paid for that used to work…
Now the holiday season is back and my kids will once again be bored out of their minds because PLEX DOWNLOADS DOESN’T WORK.
Agree. This is another of those features shoved to the side by the devs. It’s faulty, has been reported ad nauseum and Plex is not interested in fixing it.
It’s one of the reasons why Podcasts did not make the impact it should have simply because the nuanced of downloading / syncing content using the numerous rules within the downloading mechanism just did not work properly, ruining any chance for Podcasts to be successful as a separate feature.
Layering the Downloading mechanics on top of the Podcasts features imploded everything and made it a complete mess, hence I believe Plex had to scale back and sunset Podcasts until the damage they created was fixed later.
The download feature for Android hasn’t worked for me at all until recently. Several app updates and I created extra port forwarding rules. I use an IP whose router does not have a modem only mode and Unifi networking. Every other device has worked perfectly well with the ISP router being connected to the UniFi controller, Unifi controller providing DHCP services and the ISP one not. Services for checking for double NAT and CGNAT were and are reporting negative to those possibilities. Out of curiosity I created a port forward rule in the ISP router as well as the one in UniFi, now Plex downloads works…
Just adding my voice to the request to improve this.
I’ve had no end of trouble with download.
It is literally the only reason I bought a lifetime subscription, but for about half the time it doesn’t work. I only use it for music, but I have about 20K tracks on my server and try to squeeze what I can onto my phone. So, I have to use transcoding and can get around 5K tracks into about 50GB. When it works.
I’ve had countless occasions where I’ve tried to download some new albums and it has taken days before I’ve managed to get it working. Sometimes it complains about exceeding the allocated space (but that has never been a genuine situation) but mostly it just sits and does nothing except say it’s initialising. And then every now and then I’ll get a burst of activity and get some tracks.
I’ve been through quite a few upgrades and none have made any difference to the unreliability of this.
I am tempted to cut my losses and abandon Plex altogether, but I don’t want to spend time researching what’s better.
For me, also on Android, the problems happen when I try to play Downloaded songs on my smartphone while being on mobile data. I once had “Download via tethered network” on, but deactivated it shortly after. But for any reason, the Plex app tries to sync the downloaded files every time I open the “Downloads” section, even when I’m not on WiFi. That may be fine if the connection is reliable, but when riding the train it very often isn’t. And while checking, no playing of downloaded content is possible.
I learned that when going into airplane mode, playing downloaded songs works just fine. But not when I have a internet connection, even if it is really bad. I mean, Downloads should just work on a poor connection, right? Or at least Plex should be able to take that setting correct, not to use mobile network for syncing downloads.
Please fix this. This is for sure one of the main features one may buy a Plex lifetime pass for. But it’s just not working correctly.
I have a Plex Pass, and a 32 Terabyte NAS and I love this system for managing my media. I have a by-the-gig data plan on my phone, so I do NOT want Plex using my mobile data AT ALL. Today, for the second time, Plex ate a Gigabyte of data in 15 minutes and I was not even streaming anything. It did it in the background. I have set the app to not use background data, to not sync on mobile data, and to preferred playing downloaded content, but I wasn’t even playing any. I use PlexAmp to play my downloaded content, and it works. It doesn’t eat mobile data.
My system alerted me that the offending app was, indeed, Plex. It shuts my mobile data off, but now I can’t use any mobile data until my next billing cycle unless I pay for another Gig, which is $15.
I have read other threads complaining of this problem, but no one from the Plex team seems to respond.
Plex dev team, fix the data leak in Plex ASAP.
