The biggest problem with Plex (I’m a user) is that you need a network connection just to use it with your local media unless you do a little research to figure out how to bypass this.
Why is this a problem? You don’t notice it until there’s a network outage and you want to watch something. Or if the Plex servers are glitching. It’s needlessly complicating the process of watching your media.
Not really sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve had a network outage for the past 2 days and was able to watch stuff on my local NAS just fine. I haven’t done anything special to make it do that.
You need to specifically set it up to work offline. It’s not out of the box. Either the setup guide you followed included that step, or you went out of your way to enable it, and forgot about it. It’s been that way for 5+ years, at the very least.
It’s just a setting like so many other things. You can put in individual IPs you trust or IP ranges.
It seems Plex has figured out lots of Plex ‘server admins’ are just normal Windows users and click OK on everything w/o reading any change logs or checking any settings. So it’s easier and saver to enable a lot of things right away. Admins can just go into settings and adjust it.
Could you provide a few examples or point me in the right direction to bypass the always online or call home features.
Currently my Library is shared with a reverse proxy and only accessable through CloudFlare. My firewall and pihole block my Plex server from sending anything to the Plex analytics address. Within Plex settings I have it set that Plex is not accessible online.
The biggest problem with Plex (I’m a user) is that you need a network connection just to use it with your local media unless you do a little research to figure out how to bypass this. Why is this a problem? You don’t notice it until there’s a network outage and you want to watch something. Or if the Plex servers are glitching. It’s needlessly complicating the process of watching your media.
Not really sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve had a network outage for the past 2 days and was able to watch stuff on my local NAS just fine. I haven’t done anything special to make it do that.
You need to specifically set it up to work offline. It’s not out of the box. Either the setup guide you followed included that step, or you went out of your way to enable it, and forgot about it. It’s been that way for 5+ years, at the very least.
You must have. Plex uses their servers to login and there is a setting to not require authentication when on this subnet.
It’s just a setting like so many other things. You can put in individual IPs you trust or IP ranges.
It seems Plex has figured out lots of Plex ‘server admins’ are just normal Windows users and click OK on everything w/o reading any change logs or checking any settings. So it’s easier and saver to enable a lot of things right away. Admins can just go into settings and adjust it.
Could you provide a few examples or point me in the right direction to bypass the always online or call home features.
Currently my Library is shared with a reverse proxy and only accessable through CloudFlare. My firewall and pihole block my Plex server from sending anything to the Plex analytics address. Within Plex settings I have it set that Plex is not accessible online.
Is there anything else that I can do or missed.
Here’s one article that runs through it, otherwise just search for terms like “plex local network” or “plex local authentication”
https://www.howtogeek.com/303282/how-to-use-plex-media-server-without-internet-access/
Sure but if the severs are down managed users cannot login.