Source
r/PleX•
dreesemonkey

Fire tablet SD storage sync issues

Help

I have plexpass and two inexpensive Fire 7" tablets for my kids. When they work, they're great plex machines because they use expandable microSD storage and I won't care if they destroy a $40 tablet.

The issues that I'm having is the Plex app will constantly switch the Sync > Storage settings from External to Internal, thereby "losing" my movies when I browse the local device. Sometimes if I just switch the storage location back to external it will find them again, but as it just so happens I checked tonight and neither of them work this time (the day before a long car ride). This is incredibly frustrating because putting 10+ movies back on each tablet is very time-consuming when it needs to transcode each one each time.

Has anyone else had this issue and maybe has a solution?

Posted Jun 23, 2017, 12:23 AM UTC

108
nick592prouty•

I had the same issue on my fire tablet. Move the app to the SD card and it will fix the issue.

2
dreesemonkeyOP•

Thanks, I did read that somewhere so I'm giving it a try. Unfortunately since the transcode/sync process was taking so long I was only able to get a couple of movies over, so for now I'm just syncing them manually to the card and I'll use VLC.

2
camer_n•

I can't really help with the root of the problem since I don't have fire tablets. One tip though would be to use optimized versions for the movies and then sync. That way your server only has to transcode each movie once. I think a regular sync would cause it to transcode twice for the same movie since you are syncing to two devices.

Hope you're able to get it figured out. I was actually considering getting one of those since they're so cheap and could be great for plex, but now I'm reconsidering given that issue.

1
dreesemonkeyOP•

Thanks, I actually just did some digging right before I got your message and found the optimize setting, that will be a big help.

I looked on the plex forums and this is definitely a known issue, and it doesn't seem to be limited just to the fire tablets. It seems that with each restart, the storage location will get reset. Someone claims that if you install plex onto the SD card itself that it will solve the issue, so I'm going to give that a try.

Hopefully some of these movies can get synced overnight for me!

1
factoid_•

The exact same thing happened to me. I had assumed it was related to cancelling a monthly plexpass, going back to free and then switching to a lifetime plex pass, though.

I haven't tried reloading much on it.

I 100% agree that loading content to the tablets is way too time consuming and it's worse trying to do it with 2. There needs to be some way to say "transcode this crap one time, and send it to the following devices".

In a perfect world there would be options to save that sync-able file so that any device that wants an encoded version of a show or movie in that bitrate can just sync it. It would be storage intensive, so you'd need a way to clean those up from time to time, but that's not that hard to implement.

1
dreesemonkeyOP•

Just FYI another poster brought it up, under plex server you can select "optimize" in your library (per movie, or for the library I think) and it will do exactly that.

Right now I've just fallen back to copying the movie files manually to the microSD card. Take THAT, jerks!

1
troymccabe•

Are you using the kids profile? Android has some strangeness with access rights to mountable media across profiles

1
parkerflyguy•

I have this same problem on a Samsung tablet! I hope it get resolved

1