There is another issue that wasn’t included in my original post that was causing issues for some. When downloading large playlist, there would be a long pause between downloading each file. We have a special Android build to try and fix this if anyone is interested in testing.
Please note, this is only valid on Arm64 devices. If you have an ArmV7 or Intel cpu, this build will not install. This version will install over the current public or beta versions. You will need to uninstall the app (losing any downloads) to go back to an earlier version if you need to. Once a newer store version is available, that will install over this one.
Still having two issues with the new download feature.
Files over 2GB on external storage are still not working for me. Yes, I am running beta (8.28.0.29997). I get an error: Failed to play downloaded file, external storage not found. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling.
Like others mentioned above, I am also getting the waiting to download instead of saying it’s downloading. However it is really downloading. It goes straight from waiting to complete. So it’s really working, just confusing.
I have included logs here. plex-log.zip (899.0 KB)
Thank you for this file. Just to verify it, it puts me at 8.28,0.29997 (b8797b05). Indeed, the problem was with large playlists. The first few files downloaded very fast with the remaining slowing down to a crawl. I came by accident to a workaround, albeit painful, to go through following steps to bring it back on track:
While the app was stuck in download, quit Plex app and forcefully close it so there are no open connections.
Then clear the cache. The cache really never got bigger than 10Mb so I was bringing it down to 0.
Start Plex app and at this point the download was picking up what was remaining and downloading it very fast as I would expect for mp3 files.
Now, this is all great and good if you do it per download (playlist, album etc.). However, when you start queuing up your downloads, then, the procedure above has to be performed multiple times, hence my comment about being “painful”.
I am not sure what’s going on in the background but something tells me that whatever your app is doing gets stuck until connection is cleared and cache removed.
Well I was awfully excited that this had been fixed. Finally got around to giving it a try. For whatever reason my plex app would plain refuse to let me manage synced content and therefore delete all the old stuff, so I switched on new downloads and downloaded 3 episodes of a show…great…nice and fast.
Then I formatted the SD card in my A7 so I could get a nice clean start with downloads…and here I am staring at the progress wheel that will be lucky to download an episode in a couple hours.
That is the current beta. The file I gave is a slightly older build so you can’t install it over the current beta. You will have to uninstall the beta first before you can install this one.
Are you able to stream that video in direct play? It’s an hevc file, but from what I can find, the Tab A7 does not support hevc, but the app did find the device has an hevc decoder. Your logs also show the device is on Android 11. I can only find Android 10 as the official OS. Are you running a custom rom?
It is on official android 11. It got the update a while ago. Link.
It looks like HEVC is the issue. Specifically not all HEVC files, but only HDR10 files.
Downloading fails when it’s HDR. Direct streaming also falls back to transcode.
8-bit HEVC works fine. Large AVC files over 2GB also download fine.
I guess I will have to re-encode those files.
Interestingly, local playback in VLC player works fine even for HDR files.
You were correct. The release number has changed (slightly lower to the one I reported earlier) and it seems that my long playlists are downloading now without a problem. I am keeping my finger crossed.
I don’t know if that feature works at all. That’s another area that hasn’t worked well in the past. You can give it a try, but I don’t think it will work.
Doesn’t work for downloads, works for sync, seriously, what’s the real benefit of downloads now. Now I’m plagued by the snail pace downloads on iOS… Sheesh…
When will downloads have the ability to edit the number of episodes to download? It’s really unfortunate to delete/readd a show to change the number of episodes to download.
I think you can change the number of episodes to download, at least on iOS. You can’t do so from the Downloads tab, unfortunately, but if you go to the show and press the Download button as you would the very first time you want to download the show, it will allow you to alter the existing settings for that show. Be sure to navigate to the show’s page if you’re syncing the entire show, or to show’s season’s page if you’re syncing only a particular season; if mismatched, a new Download entry will be created rather than the existing entry edited.
I think the question above was about setting a limit when downloading playlists. Right now it’s all or nothing. I don’t have any news on when that feature may be available, but it is something we are considering.
I changed to Beta version and nothing would download. I queued things up and it just stayed in “waiting to download”. Changed back to public version, queued things up and it downloaded, albeit at an extremely slow pace. Sorry I can’t help you with any logs etc.
If you say its gone public I will go and try it now, I will make sure my plex is up to date and try to download something and see if it’s going at a reasonable speed. 2 secs…
