New Plex IOS Client - Download for TV Sucks

Software
1

I’ve just downloaded it to have a look on my iPad and the downloads functionality seems to be rubbish.

I can’t see a way to download rolling content (e.g. the next 10 unwatched episodes in a Season of TV, or even a way to download a whole TV series. It looks like you have to download episodes one by one.

Also when you then go to watch the content you’ve downloaded in the downloads area, it lists all of the video files separately so you’ve got to go and find the TV Episode you want to watch next.

I’m not sure who designed this, but it seems like a retrograde step to me.

2

I’ve managed to download the whole series (admittedly of one I hand’t started) by going the shows page and pressing the download button. All 14 episodes downloaded.

3

In the new style App?

The only place I can find a download option is on individual episodes, whereas before there were options on a whole Series or on a whole season.

4

No, it’s utterly stupid - you are correct :rofl:
It looked like it was downloading 14 items, but only did one…

5

apparently it’s “Coming soon” :man_shrugging:

1 Like
6

Indeed, you can’t download a series or show yet.

On the other hand the download in the old iOS app was basically broken for me for months. It would take several times longer than the runtime of the media, which made downloading things before I went away with work impossible. Now it downloads at normal speed, so that’s something.

7

Longer than “months,” in my experience!

Most of our family media is on plex and has been for a decade+. But when we travel, the kids don’t even try to download it to their iPads anymore. They use Disney+ and AppleTV for that because the things actually download!

(I love Plex so much. It’s brutal how bad the download experience has been though.)

8

The enshitification of Plex has been ongoing for some time.
| bought Infuse Pro lifetime to hedge my bets and I am glad I did. It has a FAR superior AppleTV and iOS app.

Only thing that drives me crazy about Infuse Pro is that you can’t see tv series in list view to be able to see the full name/ep #.

9

I’m a lifetime Plex subscriber and the thought of moving all of my content to another server platform is exhausting.

That said — what am I missing over in the Infuse lifestyle? Not being able to see full episode names sounds pretty brutal. We do a lot of old TV shows and cherry-pick episodes rather than watching them straight through.

10

Infuse can use plex as a backend so you literally need to do nothing but point infuse to plex. Now that being said if you do go infuse front end, self hosting jellyfin for free is probably a better option (FOSS). I find the server works well as backend but the clients suck. Using infuse works great, but doesn’t support live (and their clients don’t hardly at all), and there is no multiple user support or way to support remote transcoding.

My wife enjoys plex frontend with my HD Homerun combined, and the kids have separate accounts that are curated so for now we stick with plex. But I’m actively running jellyfin in parallel and waiting to make the switch if infuse adds a few features or jellyfin catches up.

Also, don’t forget there is Emby as well.

1 Like
11

I just switched last weekend to Infuse plus the built in MacOS file sharing (I only watch locally, not across the web, so no need for Plex Media Server), and I’m really happy. A lot of the films I watch were for some reason glitching on Plex (cutting out briefly then resuming several time in a film), and the same movies play flawlessly on Infuse. I much prefer the interface too.

I definitely recommend Infuse, it’s a beautiful interface and design and is less buggy than Plex.

12

Thanks to both of you for helpful insights. I’m not experiencing the bugs during playback (that would be infuriating!) and I utilize the multi-user and web stream features regularly (am doing so at this moment for music, in fact). I’ll stick with Plex for now.