Like others I’m having issues with Downloads. Sync has worked great for years, but now I can’t get anything to download.
From what I can tell the videos transcode without issue, but they never download to the device. I’ve tried downloads overnight, and all day long, with not a single successful download.
I’ve removed all old Sync’d content, removed all downloads, deleted the iOS app, and then reinstalled. All of this and I still can’t download anything. Attached are my logs. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
Another chime in here as well: sync has always worked well but download seems somewhat broken.
I’ve set the download quality to 1080p 8mbps but for some reason it ignores the second half. The file takes hours to download and ends up being 1080p 28mbps.
Update: Same behavior on both iPad Mini 6 and iPhone 13 Pro Max. The later cannot even play the file.
Sync has never worked well for me, but it does work. I’ve yet to get Downloads to work even once on any of the 4 Apple devices in my family. I can see it transcode on the server if I force it to, but nothing will ever download to the iPad.
I’m seeing the same issue. I’m trying to sync some music (original quality so hopefully little to no transcoding) using the new downloads. Sync worked perfectly fine but Downloads does not.
I tried “Downloading” a single audio file and it’s stuck downloading the single file. I verified I have no synced items. Tried deleting the app and reinstalling, disabling/enabling Downloads, from the same network and cell network, etc. No change. The Plex app seems pretty unresponsive.
I am experiencing very similar problem. When I Download a TV show from my iPhone app, I can see that the media is transcoded on the media server. But, when the transcoding is finished, the file never downloads on my iPhone… if it is connected on the same network than the media server. If I turn off WiFi, my iPhone gets connected over 4G and the download starts
I tried many operation (reinstall app, restart media server, deactivate download over mobile connection, change quality parameter…) without success.
Posting here, as I found a fix in my case - hoping it may help others!
My issue was running out of storage space (on my iPad). The error message wasn’t saying that, it just aborted. And the space issue was because the selected bit rate does not seem to be working . What I found is,
Selected 3 Mb/s => video actually transcoded to ~ 10 Mb/s!
Selected 1.5 Mb/s => video actually transcoded to ~ 3.3 Mb/s
So by setting lower quality than really desired, I was able to fix my issue. Others may be seeing this, and may not know it - or perhaps not … LOL! But again, in case it helps anyone else.
I know the quality / bit rate is not a hard rule, but this large delta is pretty substantial. Is this a known issue?
I can confirm that I was being blocked by DNS rebinding on my router. I disabled it and it worked on the first try. While that’s great that it works now, it’s unacceptable that I have to disable a common default security check in order to make it work. I’m assuming this is going to be something that gets fixed on the Plex side to make it work with DNS rebinding protection?
We’re looking into it. The app should be able to get around the DNS rebinding, and does for streaming. That mechanism or something related isn’t working when it comes to Downloads.
I am unsure why there would be DNS rebinding issues. My setup is that I have a pfsense router which provided DNS resolution to my network. My setup is quite simple in that whilst Plex is running in a docker, it has an IP address directly on my LAN IP range 192.168.250.x and no traffic restrictions between it and other clients on my LAN or Wifi (where my phone is connected).
Per the following post I have configured the advanced option on the DNS Resolver to prevent DNS rebinding issues. Is there a way I can test this is working? https://duanenewman.net/blog/post/indirect-connections-with-plex-and-pfsense/
I’m having the exact same issue when trying “downloads” on my iPad so have still been using Sync. The other issue is that Downloads seems to default to Transcode which is annoying as I have created optimised versions for my entire blu-ray collection so that I can sync items very quickly (which works well), hoping “Downloads” will support this in a future release.
The Plex app wants to create a secured connection to your server. To do that the domain it uses needs to match specific IP addressed, that’s how security certificates work. Plex assigns you a unique IP address in the form of “your-local_ip-with-dashes.unique_identifier.plex.direct”. DNS rebinding blocks this translating back to “your.local_ip.with.dots” so the connection fails.
I don’t know how pfsense works so I can’t help but it needs to be able to translate that plex.direct IP back to your local IP.
I also had DNS rebinding issues, but I had recently added unbound as a DNS resolver rather than using public DNS servers.
I’m running mine on Raspberry Pis using pihole, so the fix was to add private-domain: plex.direct to the end of my unbound.conf which is at /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/pi-hole.conf
I then restarted unbound (for good measure, I don’t know if it was necessary): sudo service unbound restart
Once I did that, Downloads started working as expected!
Some extra logging/notifications to users might help troubleshoot this faster, but also as it’s been mentioned - streaming works fine, so perhaps it just needs some of the same logic as streaming.
Last thing - are Downloads supposed to show up anywhere in Plex’s Dashboard? I didn’t see any in the main dashboard or the Sync area. If not, I think a separate Downloads section might be helpful, just to monitor transcodes and download progress.
Just chiming in with feedback, no need to respond.
We too have had no luck trying out the new Download feature. I removed all sync’d content from all devices, including 300GB from my iPad, force-closed all the apps. Shutdown the server, nuked the caches, restarted the apps, enabled the new feature, then started the server and attempted a download from my iPhone (off-network, via LTE) and another from my iPad (on local network). They spin and spin and spin, but nothing actually happens.
I’m afraid I don’t have the bandwidth to pull logs and do diagnostics. Just wanted to send some feedback that it doesn’t feel ready for primetime. We will stick with Ol’ Trusty and wait to be force-moved at whatever point that happens. I have already switched everything back to Sync and started the long process of transcoding/pulling the media for my iPad again.
Same for me!
Somehow server finished conversion, and now download restarts every time when I launch the plex on ios, but never finishes. All synced videos were deleted both on server and on iOS. iOS app was reinstalled. Previously sync feature worked fine. What shall I do to make it work?
Unfortunately, downloads do not work for me either. On iPhone and iPad (latest iOS and latest Plex app) downloading just doesn’t work. As with many others, the download always says 0.0kb downloaded. On my iMac (macOS Monterey and latest Plex app) it works.
Thanks for the detail. I have this in place already so really confused why it’s not working. The pfsense is a fairly strict firewall so I also have also enabled NAT Reflection on the port forward for Plex.
This should allow connections from inside the LAN to the external IP to be processed by the port forward. As a result connections from internal clients may show as coming from the WAN IP address but connections should work.
. What I found is,
