There are various solutions on this thread so ill throw mine out as well.
I was having syncing issues with my old IPad, around 2014. It seems like the issue were the default sync settings. I had it at 720p 4MBs with a resolution of 1920x1080. After dropping that down to 720p 2MBs and resolution of 1280x720 the syncs started working. You can get to this to menu after you click the sync button from the movie -> Video quality. Make sure to remove synced items on the device prior to doing this. My guess is the resolution was breaking things. I did not rollback, reinstall, etc. This is the only adjustment I made.
My own sync issues - and what I’ve done to (maybe) work around:
My Server is on a Mac.
My Android Clients are two identical Amazon Fire HD 10s - configured to use a SD card.
My issue was that nothin would sync.
Everything would get stuck “Waiting to Download” Or “Updating Information”
One device I purchased for me - one purchased for my Mother.
After many days of tinkering and failure… I figured out that “My” HD10 was actually syncing with no real issues - my Mom’s HD10 was the problem child…
Seeing that, I deleted everything from my Mother’s HD10 an erased the SD card. Started over from scratch - but still had the same issue.
I went through the settings one by one comparing the two devices and eventually I came down to just once difference: My Mom’s device was configured to use a “Mom” Home User account I had set up for her in Plex - while my own device uses my master Plex pass account - whatever you want to call it.
I was at the end of my rope and signed back into my mom’s device using my id and that made a world of difference.
Since that I have managed to sync 60ish GB (and counting) Movies, Music, Photos, and TV Shows with only one single issue - a 2 episode TV season I tried to sync got “stuck” and would not complete the sync (One of the two episodes got stuck waiting to download.)
I deleted that one from the client side and tried it again - it worked as well as everything else I’ve tried since.
So. In my case the issue appears to be that I was using a “Home User” and not my own account. (I did make sure Mom’s account was allowed to Sync - so that wasn’t the issue.)
Not sure if this will help anybody but I’m putting it out there in case.
Thanks for the comprehensive report @Mike_W_OH. Just for the record, syncing with a Home account is supported and should work fine. If you encounter the problem again can you please share PMS and application logs please?
Thank you for the attention - it is much appreciated.
So far I have continued to have success with both devices with no additional failures.
Today while I was at work I created a music playlist and synced it to my device remotely with no issues…
When I got home I found the latest episode of my Mom’s favorite TV show had been recorded and synced to her device.
So. I’m in a good place right now. I wished I had saved logs from my failures. I looked at them and it was crazy, but, I took no notes and didn’t save.
I’m not going to tinker too much now until Santa has made his rounds!
After Christmas I will again have a second device to mess with (her old Fire Tablet) and I will see if I can recreate it and provide you logs. I also joined the Beta program and I’ll be happy to test out for ya.
I have a similar problem on LG V30 with latest version of Plex. Interestingly enough, the issue occurs most often when the phone locks the screen. Unlocking the screen seems to restart the synchronization process. The screen lock seems to also block streaming directly (no sync enabled) for my music titles. I have been messing with different settings on the phone and in the app, but to no avail. I have tested all previously posted “fixes” and none of them seems to have solved the problem.
I checked the server side and it is sitting idle, with no utilization spikes when synchronization problems occur. CPU is at <2%, so it is not likely caused by utilization on server side. No networking problems (had parallel ping on phone to my server IP, no packet loss, no latency spikes).
Not sure whether it applies to other folks’ cases, but it seems that disabling power saving associated with Plex app seems to have removed the synchronization problems. For some reason, the application was throttled down, causing communication with the server to be interrupted. Might be worth checking
@mmzon do you mean the android put to sleep mode?
I have an issue when it gets “stuck” and then starts to drain the battery. I have excluded it from power saver mode but still gets stuck.
Once I reboot it all works ok again for a little bit until it gets stuck again. This has been happening since the first version of the app and across many devices, so very appreciative of any hints.
At least the LG V30 I am using has a battery power saving mode. I have it enabled by default (to save battery, obviously). I noticed that when I disable power saving mode, Plex streams correctly, i.e., songs do not stall, there is no discernible caching, etc. The downside is the added battery drain. What I did, then,is create exception for Plex in the battery saving profile, so that it is not throttled. For the last ~6 hrs or so, i was able to stream different content with no issues observed before.
I am still struggling with sync settings, i.e., making sure that I can sync content and then play it from local store rather than direct streaming. At times, synced content stalls.
I did not notice the “stuck” behavior myself. Not sure what device you have and what server you stream from, as well as whether you have synced content or not. some more background information would be handy to understand what the setup is.
Seems like one shared point is your served on QNAP. I had similar problems first time when I set the server on a Netgear NAS and since then moved to a more dedicated platform. Depending on what you’re transcoding, the server might be simply getting stuck. Have you tried monitoring server utilization at the time when the player gets frozen?
Just wanted to update, the power saving exception rule does not solve the problem with synced content that just stops playing. It does seem to resolve the issue with direct streaming from server, at least for me.
I am also having difficulty syncing. I have a Mac Mini running plex and would like to sync most of music my library to my iPhone. I know this is a lot of music, but I broke it up to two jobs–just the artists who began with the letter “A” and then the rest in a second job. I set it up, went to sleep, and woke up to find the first job stuck on 50% and the second job had not begun. I am attaching my logs. Thank you.
I have the same issue. My main user can sync on an old tablet and my Samsung Note 8 phone, but if I switch to a home user, it fails to sync on both devices. I do think I’m one version behind right now on the server side but haven’t had a chance to upgrade. Right now I’ve resigned to syncing media with my main user and switching to that when offline for my daughter on her tablet but this is less than ideal as my account is not limited by content rating, so if the tablet comes back online, she’ll be able to immediately start watching Dredd EG, which is an excellent film but arguably not appropriate for 3 year olds.
I have figured out that sync seems to work 99% of the time if I add (sync) the files using my phone. If I add them from my server, sync gets hung up on waiting or pending.
This is still a pretty consistent issue for me as well.
My logs show a lot of Sync: packaging add at A for sync list B, metadata item C: X > Y
(though with actual numbers for all those letters I subbed in). It looks like a group of 14 tracks stuck in a loop of trying to pack and then failing out. Is there something in my metadata that is structured in a way that sync doesn’t like? Is there a way to find out what actual tracks are failing?
Poking around in my client logs instead of the server logs reveals the same naturalsort stack trace that was mentioned above. It looks like it checks for new changes to sync, sees that there are changes, syncs the DB changes, sets the status to “downloading”, and then immediately (well, 0.02s later, which I guess isn’t really immediate in computing) throws the sqlite exception.
I’ve attached that snippet of the logs from my phone, it basically just loops that over and over again unless I pause the sync job. plex_android_sync_fail.log (8.7 KB)
Not sure if this has been said in the many replies.
Mine was stuck because an episode of Peppa bleedin Pig was waiting to Sync to an iPad we hadn’t used in months.
So worth going to the Server, settings, Sync and check all the connected devices.
It seems sync is linear and not as intelligent as you would hope.
Thanks for the log extract. As it is only a short extract, I cannot tell what version of the app this was on. Could you please attach the full zip please as you would get from share debugging data
These log entries suggest that there may have been a network issue on the Mac at the time - 08:14am Jan 5th
Jan 05, 2019 08:14:56.925 [0x70000a2bb000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49818] 200 GET /sync/C14F9039-0A81-482D-9F98-4F72D53376ED/package?changestamp=746837&limit=25&onlyDeletes=1 (17 live) TLS GZIP 37854ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 9)
Jan 05, 2019 08:15:29.760 [0x70000a2bb000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49835] 200 GET /sync/C14F9039-0A81-482D-9F98-4F72D53376ED/package?changestamp=746837&limit=25&onlyDeletes=1 (16 live) TLS GZIP 48805ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 2)
Jan 05, 2019 08:16:46.176 [0x70000a33e000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49755] 200 GET /photo/:/transcode/?height=256&minSize=0&url=http%3A%2F%2F127.0.0.1%3A32400%2Fsync%2Fitems%2F32622098%2Fcomposite%2F543141&width=256 (20 live) TLS GZIP 240634ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 25)
Jan 05, 2019 08:16:49.456 [0x70000a33e000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49786] 200 GET /photo/:/transcode/?height=256&minSize=0&url=http%3A%2F%2F127.0.0.1%3A32400%2Fsync%2Fitems%2F32622098%2Fcomposite%2F543141&width=256 (16 live) TLS GZIP 223519ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 4)
Jan 05, 2019 08:18:08.178 [0x70000a33e000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49749] 200 GET /sync/items/32622098 (14 live) TLS GZIP 405054ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 1)
Jan 05, 2019 08:18:08.724 [0x70000a33e000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49725] 200 GET /sync/items/32622098 (14 live) TLS GZIP 469970ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 1)
Jan 05, 2019 08:18:08.814 [0x70000a33e000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49734] 200 GET /sync/items/32622098 (14 live) TLS GZIP 449712ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 1)
Jan 05, 2019 08:18:08.879 [0x70000a33e000] DEBUG - Completed after connection close: [10.0.1.3:49741] 200 GET /sync/items/32622098 (14 live) TLS GZIP 425904ms 0 bytes (pipelined: 3)
Also these entries suggest that may be network interface lost its IP address and ended up with 169.254.210.186 at or just before 08:14:56
Jan 05, 2019 08:14:56.231 [0x70000ae80000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 169.254.210.186 to 169.254.255.255: Can't assign requested address
Jan 05, 2019 08:14:56.231 [0x70000ab6e000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 169.254.210.186 to 169.254.255.255: Can't assign requested address
Jan 05, 2019 08:15:01.228 [0x70000b527000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 169.254.210.186 to 239.255.255.250: Can't assign requested address
Jan 05, 2019 08:15:01.252 [0x70000a444000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 169.254.210.186 to 169.254.255.255: Can't assign requested address
Jan 05, 2019 08:15:01.253 [0x70000b62d000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 169.254.210.186 to 169.254.255.255: Can't assign requested address
For sync issues it is always best to get logs from both sides - so if you have issues eg sync getting stuck, note down the time, take screenshot and then get the logs from the mobile app and the server
See these articles for how to share the debugging data (you send the zip to your email address and then attach here with the server logs zip and screenshots and any relevant detail)
I have just done test comparison between iOS and Android for sync instigated from within Plex Web. The difference is that for iOS, you do need to open the app to start the download
Adding a note about iOS - the background activities that the Plex for iOS app does are controlled by the iOS operating system. It may take a while before tasks are triggered
Sorry - your post was missed. Are you still having this problem. The sync was stuck because of an issue with the internal database the Plex for Android App uses
