Hey everyone, been doing some testing with the new plex downloads. I initially shared this feedback in Reddit but followed Daves advise to use the oficial foruns for this. So copy paste below:
I’m been testing it lately, on an oneplus one device running a clean android 10 rom, hopefully it’s old enough to work as a semi worst case scenario, as well as, as up to date as possible.
I’ve tried downloading single content and an entire season. None seemed to work properly. I’ll be honest, I’m bummed with this. I constantly get errors saying “failed to download” and I need to tap on it to retry. When I come back, another error. Constantly.
One thing I didn’t like was that I no longer have the option to transcode the downloaded content. If I had a 32 gig storage device I wouldn’t want to download 9 gig movies to it. At least add the possibility of pressing and holding the download button to show a list of resolutions, where we can pick one to transcode to that. (Doesn’t have to be a resolution, it’s just an example) this way if I want to reduce the size of the files I can just pick a different “optimized version”. Yes it’s slower but it’s an option the user should pick. Otherwise, just clicking on the download arrow will trigger the download which on that regard is looking great. (Edit: some of the Reddit comments seemed to hint that this is in fact possible. I might be going blind…)
Now, synced content. I requested it to download an entire season (small one, 13 episodes). Started downloading the 2nd episode. Then the third. Then the first one. Then the 8th. It’s all over the place. This is the worst option because it does not allow me to watch anything until it finishes downloading. And I kept getting the error where it says “couldn’t download x items, swipe to remove or tap to retry” constantly.
I feel like the error handling needs to be looked at because every time the error “1 item couldn’t be downloaded” appears it stops downloading until I tap it again. This is the exact same issue I had with sync in the past. So something is still not right here. I also feel like whenever the screen turns off it throws the error. Not necessarily immediately but frequently enough that I turned on the “caffeine mode” to keep the screen on for 15 minutes to see if it gave the same error - and it did. So I’m not sure what’s up. -
Another thing, you’ll probably want to add more technical details in the download menu. Not knowing what it’s doing (is it downloading anything? It just says “preparing” but it’s been 5 minutes and it’s still preparing… ) is confusing. And the errors make it even worse because there’s no information and the pops out of nowhere.
Edit: On the other hand THANK YOU for adding the total used space in the Downloads menu - life changer!!! -
So yeah. Decent effort. Not quite there it would seem. Contact me if you want logs or to look at the issue directly, I’d be more than happy to assist/share screen/send screenshots or clips if needed.
Example of error below: Plex downloads - Album on Imgur
Edit: oh forgot to add, unifi network in 5ghz channel with ap in the same room. Tried it on an ASUS router, same issues. I do have a pihole but I have no issues with it and plex, nor am I blocking anything plex related, so I don’t think it’s related, but again, available for a check up if needed.
Logs:
plex-log-SeveranExp.zip (2.2 MB)
This is my first time creating logs for plex so if needed I’ll repeat my testing to ensure that I did it properly.
