Plex needs to improve the downloads feature

[anon18523487]

Known issue. See [BUG] External SRT subtitles not working with downloaded videos - #2 by MovieFan.Plex.

[adamlogan]

Server:
Plex hardware: Synology NAS DS 918+
Plex Server V: 1.32.4.7195-7000

Player/Client
Google Pixel 7a
OS: Android V 13, security update June 5, 2023.
Android Plex Client V 9.25.0.2374

I have prefer downloaded/offline content enabled, battery optimization is set to off for Plex, background downloading is allowed in the OS, but in the app I have it set to not download offline content over cellular.

I use the downloads feature mostly for music, and my experience has been so bad I am looking into other solutions. It’s music, already encoded to 192 kbps opus mostly, there is some content that was already in mp3 and a couple other formats in already low quality that I dared not re-encode. An average track is between 5 and 8 MB. It should not beachball looking for content that should already be downloaded to the phone. Plex behaves like it’s never really sure if the downloaded content is downloaded or not. I get the impression the stuff I see under downloads isn’t actually downloaded, and that plex downloads an unknown amount of stuff every time I open that downloads category. It beachballs whenever I open the downloads category as I have two different shares, one is for conventional music, and the other is brain entrainment music, it takes forever just to show these two libraries. And then going into one of the two libraries is really flaky too. It feels like interacting with a library over 56k dialup, but it should be nearly instantaneous as it should already have been downloaded to the phone. Really frustrating experience. Please make downloading and offline functionality feature robust and seamless. I would like to see KB and percentage of the downloads rather than an abstract circle of download completion. It also needs to actually be accurate. I got notification that I used up 5 GB of my cellular connection and I am dumbfounded. I suspect 3GB of that or more was Plex despite my settings and despite the fact that I always attempted to download on my home network with a fiber connection with symetrical 200 MB UL/DL.

[lordabdul]

Option 2 for me. I’ve been using Plex for so long that I remember the time the feature was called “Sync”, and then was rewritten/renamed to “Downloads” because it didn’t work… it still doesn’t work. This morning I tried to use it – it had been a while, I figured maybe it got better, but no. After a couple hours of fighting Plex, various errors, stuck downloads, slow downloads, and more, I just gave up and went to Infuse which “just works”. The fact that it can connect to the Plex server directly is giant advantage, too.