this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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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.
I believe what they're getting at is an issue if they're not already authenticated prior to the outage. Then they'd have no access to their media unless they look into the workaround for that beforehand. It has been an issue in the past, especially when Plex's auth servers go down. I remember plenty of Reddit threads complaining about it.
if you have to ask someone else to access your own [local] data, youre doing it wrong. ack
i wouldn’t say wrong… it’s SSO. i have multiple servers on my plex account, and i much prefer to have a single login for all of them than different for every server. it also allows things like login with plex for overseer etc
it’s a trade-off for sure, but i’d argue a very worthwhile one
perhaps you could argue that you should be able to run the auth server yourself, and sure… maybe… but i think that’s the worst of both worlds
Yeah this is pretty much it. When it first happened to me I had no idea and just wrote it off as a glitch. Then it happened again or the Plex servers were out so everyone was talking about it. There should never be a reason for your home media server to need access beyond the local LAN.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks.
Ehhhhhh. I don't think anyone expects to be setting up their Plex server with an Internet outage. As long as you have been setup prior and you lose Internet you can still log in with the last local profile you used. It's not perfect but you're not locked out. No workaround (at this point in time) is necessary, assuming you've already authed and added your server to your "whatever" device.
And ultimately you just keep Kodi for the apocalypse. This complaint about "not being able to access your media" if the internet is out is misleading. Of course you can access your media if the internet is out, it just might not necessarily be with Plex which is ultimately an online service. Sure we can call it a limitation but that's just nit-picking since most everyone has their Internet up almost all the time, offline does work, and there's plenty of other ways to access your media.
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.
Yeah, one of the reasons I love plex is I don't actually need to be connected to the internet for it to work. Just my home network. All my devices work fine when the internet goes out, which is frequently does during storm season
No managed users then? I’ve never had them be able to use their profile when plex is down.
Just me.
I'm old and have very few friends, heh. Especially ones who would even know what plex is
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.