Plex Mobile Player for iOS is broken

[duncanro]

Server Version#: 1.19.5.3035 on Ubuntu Linux
Player Version#: 7.2.1 on iOS

Hi,

The iOS Plex player is unusable. I have a last gen Ipod touch (256GB) and I generally use it to sync music locally from my Plex library then play it on the go.

The sync is an arduous process to say the least. Sometimes it gets stuck at 50% no matter what I do, sometimes it takes a very long while to actually start downloading - imagine the frustration having to wait 5-10 minutes for a 2 track EP to sync.

Once it does sync, playing in offline mode just destroys the device battery. Granted, it doesn’t help that the battery capacity for this version of the ipod is not that great, but still - 60% battery drain in 20 minutes of playing music? That’s something.

And as others have reported here, the device heats up pretty quickly to the point that I can actually feel it in my pocket.

The problem as I see it is that anything that the Plex client does (be it sync or just playing stuff) constantly keeps the ipod CPU at above 70%, while clients like Spotify and Apple Music don’t go above 10-15%.

I haven’t had problems with the client for a long period of time, but these last couple of months worth of updates just made it practically unusable. Hope someone in the Plex stafflistens and finally gets to fixing it.

Thanks.

[alanjudy_yahoo_com]

I have similar problems. Working to get rid of my dependence on iTunes for on-device music, I switched to Plex. Don’t have as many sync problems as mentioned above because I’ve already completed a huge sync and any changes are small.

I do see the battery drain and the CPU usage. What’s worse is that playing local Plex music in the background is interrupted by foreground apps which never occurred in iTunes. Very simple context changes, notifications, and other situations cause Plex music to stagger, or pause momentarily. Headphone controls while Plex is playing in the background to pause, resume, back track, forward track sometimes don’t work or work with a huge delay.

Not seeing this when Pandora or iTunes is used (background play continues uninterrupted as all these events occur, headphone controls work as expected)