I’ve been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” Based on that I don’t think Plex qualifies.
Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my “friends” were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.
Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.
So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?
For me, if I can’t use it when the internet is down it’s not self-hosting, so Plex certainly isn’t for me.
This can be done but you need to set the ip address ranges that don’t require auth when you can still get into the server(aka have internet). Then it works without internet fine.
What? You need internet to use plex? Can’t you just type in the local IP?
You can use Plex without the Internet. But it takes an extra two or three setup steps, so lots of people immediately jump to “wahhh my Plex isn’t working” when their Internet goes out. Not because it can’t work, but because they didn’t jump through the extra hoops to ensure it does.
This. I’ve had a couple of situations where we had an ISP outage and for whatever reason Plex Auth had expired and needed to connect to their servers to regain access to local media. The first time it happened I was pissed off. The second time it happened I installed Jellyfin and never looked back.
Mine works when the internet is down. Why doesn’t yours?