We’ve been working on a major overhaul of our offline “Sync” capability in our mobile apps, and we’d like to invite you to try it out! The feature formerly known as “Sync” is now simply called Downloads, and for the most part it works the same way: take your favorite media with you to enjoy anywhere, no connection required. Some of the main advantages to the new Downloads include:
Simplicity. Most things can be downloaded with a single tap. No fiddling with settings or item limits. (You can still “subscribe” to TV shows to keep the next few eps on hand.)
Speed. Start downloading right away at full speed in most cases.
Reliability. Downloads are more consistently accessible and playback reliability has been improved whether you’re online or not.
Better format compatibility, less transcoding! Direct download anything your device can play. (You can still choose to limit the quality/size in settings if you like.)
Progressive conversion and simultaneous downloading. Downloads begin even while the source media is being transcoded; no more waiting for the entire transcode to finish before the download can begin.
Simplified management. Everything is visible and managed in the Downloads list on the device where the media was downloaded.
Sound interesting? Give it a shot and let us know how it’s working for you!
For the time being, you’ll be able to switch back and forth between old-style Sync and Downloads, but content that you have Synced will not be available under Downloads and vice versa. You should (re)Download any content you’d like to keep on your device in the long run. (Sync, along with any synced content, will be removed in a future version of the app – we’ll be sure to warn you before that happens though!)
Note: You will need to be signed into your Plex account with an active Plex Pass subscription or be part of a Plex Home of a user with a Plex Pass to use Downloads.
To start testing:
Install the latest version of our Plex for Android app (iOS coming soon!)
Open the Plex app and make sure you’re signed in to your Plex account.
Go to Settings > Sync
Check the new “Enable new downloads” opt-in setting (make sure you pay attention to the information in the warning text that gets displayed!)
First- I love this new feature and it seems to be working really well!
The only hiccup I have run into so far has been with downloading to external storage. In this case I’m downloading to a Samsung 512GB EVO Select microSD card.
For whatever reason, downloads to my SD card take an order of magnitude longer than they do to the internal storage, or using the old sync feature.
For example, I downloaded 5 TV episodes totalling 15GB and it took over six hours to the SD card! After some troubleshooting I realized what the issue was and switched it to internal storage. The same download completed in less than 5 minutes.
I’ve benchmarked the SD card using CPDT and it scores around 40MB/s sequential write which is more than fast enough to complete a 15gb download in less than 10 minutes. Furthermore, as I previously mentioned, a sync of the same 5 episodes completes in less than 10 minutes. So I know the issue can’t be my SD card.
What gives? Has anyone else noticed this issue?
Plex for Android 8.19.2.26377
Server 1.23.3.4707
On a Galaxy Tab S7+ running Android 11, Samsung OneUI 3.1
Sync fit into the alloted 10GB space I set for it on my external sd card. Download kept needing more and more room. Once I looked into files I found out why. In addition to the song and album cover and poster art, it is also downloading all the metadata for the artist including photos, posters, and concert dates. I gave it almost 20gb and it still ran out of room for the same list of playlists I used to Sync.
All that other data should not take up much space. Do you have the download audio quality set to original? Maybe it’s downloading as flac while sync might have been converting to a lower bitrate.
Will Sync remain an option for those of us who paid for lifetime passes for it, or is that feature just being taken away from us entirely? I have family and friends who I converted to Plex and one of the reasons was they could sync stuff for car journeys and flights and things. There’s no way I can or would get them to pay $5 a month just to occasionally use that feature, but I was happy to pay for the Lifetime Pass to provide it for them.
The FAQ says they’ll be grandfathered in, but only as long as they’re on my current server and remain sharees. In other words, only until something bad happens at which point this feature I specifically paid for will be… gone.
Seems worrying to me. What other features that I’ve paid for are going to be stripped away?
One of the big differences is that Downloads requires an active Plex Pass subscription for the end user who is performing the download, not for the owner of the Plex Media Server, as such.
If a close friend shares a library with you and enables the ability to Download/Sync, then you will also need a Plex Pass subscription on your account, regardless of whether your friend has a subscription or not.
This very much sounds like: Anyone that I’ve shared content with from my server and allowed them to download, they’ll now have to pay Plex to download content from my server.
I currently share with my sister. She can use the sync feature because I bought a lifetime pass to let her do so.
Sync changes to downloads.
One of her kids (or her, I wouldn’t put it past her) accidentally presses the button on her account to leave my server. (Or the disk my server is on dies and I have to start an entirely new server.)
I reshare with her.
She now has to pay $5 a month just to sync content from my server.
That is correct? If so, how is this anything other than stripping value away from people who bought Plex Passes?
I get the desire to try to get users, not just server owners, to pay for Plex Passes, and it seems a valid feature to charge for. But I paid for it already. I paid on behalf of my users. Now you’re trying to double-dip and that seems pretty scummy.
Since you are sharing with her now, her account will be grandfathered and as long as you have a Plex Pass, she will be able to use Downloads with any of your servers. If she creates a new account, or you create a new account or somehow lose your Plex Pass, then she will lose her ability.
Okay, if that’s how it’ll work then I have only minor grumbles. It’s still removing value that I paid for, but not in a way that’ll likely effect me badly. The FAQ definitely say otherwise, though.
If you delete and recreate that share, then this no longer applies. With the new share, the user would need to have their own Plex Pass subscription.
Not sure how but you fixed a really annoying issue I’ve had for the last year at least. Music I’d sync for direct play via android auto (FLAC would be transcoded to mp3 via AA which was annoying) would just say “an error occurred” and not play any downloaded music.
This is now working well. I can download music (FLAC or not) and play on the device.
I’ll have to play with android auto but I really hope that this will work via AA as well.
And a feature request for better AA support: please find a way to continue previous playback.
I start a playlist in the car, listen for a while and get to my destination, turn car off. When I get back, Plex app in Android auto completely forgets what I was listening to so i have to restart the playlist and either skip my way through to where i was, or shuffle and hope i don’t get too many repeats. This is annoying on long road trips.
I have the same issue, downloads to SD card at about 13 Mbits while getting 200 Mbits to internal memory. Approximately the same results on two devices, a Samsung S20 5G and Galaxy Tab 5e.
I have a 256 GB sd card in my android phone - set to allow over 200GB of downloads, but with only 115GB or so used, downloads says storage space is full. I have checked with file managers that there is still about 100GB available on the card.
