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+--- Forum: General Questions (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-general-questions)
+--- Thread: Download to device? (/t-download-to-device)
Download to device? - KodiUser1138 - 2025-03-01
Just watching the latest LTT WAN Show where Plex is discussed and their removal of "watch together" which seems short sighted and I'm happy I found the group watch in JF recently. The discussion turned to Plex download to device which seems to be contentios in the amount of failures encountered. I've not found a spot where JF may do this so I'm curious if JF does, or may be capable in the futre, and then by which means? Linus makes a great point that if a video requires transcoding that should be processed first before the entire new file is uploaded to the device, and I agree. Anyways just eearly Saturday morning musings.
RE: Download to device? - TheDreadPirate - 2025-03-01
Right now jellyfin-web, and all the clients based on it, allows for downloads of the media. But with no way to then play that file within Jellyfin. You'd have to use an external player on your device. Meaning no progress tracking, watch status, etc.
If you're on Android, though, Findroid (videos only) is an excellent 3rd party app that has a proper offline mode. It will sync the watch status once you are back online and will play files that you've downloaded in the app. Of course, it works as a proper Jellyfin player when online. And since Findroid has the option to use MPV as the playback engine, pre-transcoding is usually not necessary. Though that can come at a battery life penalty.
Having said all that, pre-transcoded downloads have been discussed. There is a github discussion on our "jellyfin-meta" git hub.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-meta/discussions/66
TLDR; it is not simple to implement. But we definitely agree is it something very desirable.
RE: Download to device? - KodiUser1138 - 2025-03-01
Wow thanks for the info. And also feels a bit like I'm being stalked HA! For my personal use case a -pretranscode to a smaller file size/basic audio format to pre-load onto Apple devices (I know) for use while traveling would be fantastic. Using the JF ios app would be great, of course, and syncing when back connected to the server awesome. Cool to see work is being, at the least, discussed and hoping the JF project can continue to grow!
Now if only Collections and Tags were more useful... and Album Sort embeded metadata read. Oh and IMDb Top250 metadata supported. Hehe