Living in Australia, you often have to put up with unreliable internet.
Unfortunately whenever the internet is not accessible, Plex decides because it can’t call home and shows whoever the last person logged in on the login screen (home users).
Surely some form of grace period (say 48 hours?) or remove this feature completely would be a better solution?
How many times I’ve lost internet connection and having to log back into Plex is a friggen pain!
I use offline storage of media for the sole reason that I can download when my connection is reliable, then watch offline when I want to.
Sometimes I’ve even had to restart my server to get Plex Media Server to log back in, as well as my Plex Home Theater clients.
The times like this have sincerely made me regret paying for a lifetime subscription.
@joshua.wood said:
Living in Australia, you often have to put up with unreliable internet.
Unfortunately whenever the internet is not accessible, Plex decides because it can’t call home and shows whoever the last person logged in on the login screen (home users).
Surely some form of grace period (say 48 hours?) or remove this feature completely would be a better solution?
How many times I’ve lost internet connection and having to log back into Plex is a friggen pain!
I use offline storage of media for the sole reason that I can download when my connection is reliable, then watch offline when I want to.
Sometimes I’ve even had to restart my server to get Plex Media Server to log back in, as well as my Plex Home Theater clients.
The times like this have sincerely made me regret paying for a lifetime subscription.
Hey Joshua!
It is definitely something that the devs have on their schedule for the future. It is a bit of a pain for users with unreliable internet connections today.
Slight hijack here: so, new iOS app with home users. If I sync content for playing later, will I be able to play this with no internet connection?
Say I had an iPod touch with wifi only; could I use this away from home?
How does this work on android?
I agree that Plex needs to handle loss of connection better, but seemingly for a different reason. When I lose Internet connection, it finishes the song it was on, and if it can’t play the next song, it totally fails. It would be cool if with the player could retry every few seconds, or even better, if Plex would pre-download the play queue, this way if the connection is lost, your Playlist is already downloaded. It could them be purged like normal after the paylist/song is done.
The playqueue is just a list of items and it is requested in chunks so as not to overload the clients - most have little memory.
Are we talking here about remote servers or local servers on same network ?
Local servers on same network should continue to stream locally if internet goes and clients are all expected to cache credentials and PlexPASS indication - only issue would then be if switching users
Elan mentioned though that the new smart TV players are dependent on plex.tv at the moment - so that is a special case that needs addressing
For my case, I am playing from a remote server (home) at work. When I walk out of the building, it switches from WiFi to LTE, and the next song that plays after that doesn’t play. I have to stop, then play again.
But think mistake your answer as a 1-part answer. Only the first paragraph was for me, huh? So, due to this behavior of Plex requesting chunks at a time, it is intended that it can’t download the play queue ahead of time?
Even so, is it normal for it to hang after switching networks, as of it gives up getting to connect?
@seanfrisbey said:
For my case, I am playing from a remote server (home) at work. When I walk out of the building, it switches from WiFi to LTE, and the next song that plays after that doesn’t play. I have to stop, then play again.But think mistake your answer as a 1-part answer. Only the first paragraph was for me, huh? So, due to this behavior of Plex requesting chunks at a time, it is intended that it can’t download the play queue ahead of time?
Even so, is it normal for it to hang after switching networks, as of it gives up getting to connect?
The reason i concentrated on the other scenario was because i thought it would be fully understood that remote access to servers would cease when internet connection goes. This is what the Plex Sync feature is all about allowing local copies of media to be available
I expected this feature request to be about local access and internet dependency
I understand that I can use Plex Sync as a solution, but I feel that that feature is mainly for cases when 1) you want media to stay on your device so you don’t have to stream it the 7 times per day you listen to it 2) you are going somewhere where you expect a lack of Internet. What my issue is is Internet connectivity intermittentcy. If Plex Sync is designed to mitigate that issue as well, I suppose I can’t argue with their logic, but I feel like it should be addressed separately. I would even think that predownloding the play queue and dumping it when the queue is emptied or changed, or even after the item has played, would be a nice way to handle it. Maybe even an option “Cache X songs in the queue”.
I have actually raised a request to have on-the-fly switching of connections to cover situations where say you start a playlist on your device when on your local wifi connection and then leave home and it would be good if the transition is seamless and for the players to switch connection automatically. But this would not help you as you are after buffering of a number of media tracks - i would suggest you raise this as a separate feature request
Sounds good! I figured I could piggyback on this topic for a bit, then realized that I am more hijacking the original post. Sorry, and thank you!
I’ve “liked” the original post in this thread but I’ll just put this here to be clear:
I’d love very much to be able to use Plex within my household when I don’t have access to an internet connection. Our connection is fairly unstable here and when it goes down is when we’d like to be able to use our local media library on our internal WiFi network the most.
I am currently loading my DVD and Blu-Ray collection onto disks, in order to have everything readily available when I move to an underdeveloped African country next year. I expect to have extremely unreliable internet, and I’d very much like to still be able to use plex rather than going back to manual transcoding and copying files onto USB sticks. Can’t the entire plex setup simply assume that the same state (expiry time for pass, users) it saw last time it was on internet still is valid?
@atrus said:
It is definitely something that the devs have on their schedule for the future. It is a bit of a pain for users with unreliable internet connections today.
Well, it’s been 3 months. So it obviously isn’t the near future.
I know I am late to the party but I really need someone to clear this up for me. I subscribe to PlexPass and have also acquired an account for my wife. This afternoon we were watching a movie (logged in as her) and all of a sudden the screen went blank and up came a message on my Apple TV 4 Plex App to reenter my code. I shutdown the Plex App and restarted multiple times and was presented with the same error. So I started searching the Internet and came across this post.
My question to the group is, if Internet connectivity or problems with login/authentication on the Plex.Tv site occur am I still able to watch my locally hosted content? As it stands right now, that is not the case, the Apple TV app will not let me get past the “re-enter my code” page.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Jim
@jim® said:
I know I am late to the party but I really need someone to clear this up for me. I subscribe to PlexPass and have also acquired an account for my wife. This afternoon we were watching a movie (logged in as her) and all of a sudden the screen went blank and up came a message on my Apple TV 4 Plex App to reenter my code. I shutdown the Plex App and restarted multiple times and was presented with the same error. So I started searching the Internet and came across this post.My question to the group is, if Internet connectivity or problems with login/authentication on the Plex.Tv site occur am I still able to watch my locally hosted content? As it stands right now, that is not the case, the Apple TV app will not let me get past the “re-enter my code” page.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Jim
I’m in the same boat as you … 
Sitting around with a party of people and can’t even access local LAN movies using Plex… pretty bad design … I know at least 10 couples here who won;t be buying Plex after watching this fiasco. I told them to check out Infuse on their ATV4’s …
Thanks Badgerdog! I am looking at Infuse right now.
I am similarly late to the party, but I’m rather annoyed by what is happening right now and questioning why I pay for PlexPass.
We made the mistake of pausing our movie about 20 minutes ago and now it appears that the plex.tv site is experiencing internal issues, not even internet connectivity related, and we are unable to play any content using the PS4 plex app because it cannot contact the server.
This is an absurd design decision. My ability to stream content from my home NAS should in no way be affected by internet connectivity or issues that the plex.tv site is experiencing.
I suggest that the Plex team up the priority of this item, because I can guarantee that there are many, many other users that are similarly affected right now.
Currently:
I cannot access Plex from my computer via http://app.plex.tv/web/app but I can via http://AddressOfServer:32400/web/index.html#!/dashboard
Also Plex works fine on my Rokus, Android devices, Fire TV and Raspberry Pi.
So, for me, Plex’s web goes down and everything except one access method (That I almost never use anyway) is fully operational.
It seems that the “problem” is far from earth shattering or catastrophic. It just seems that a few devices and a few people are impacted. Also Plex has stated several time in several threads that they are trying to work in a better way to handle verification when there is a loss of internet and I have noticed fixes showing up on several devices over time. I expect that the trend toward more devices seeing the fix will continue for the future.
Also remember: It is video and not a world wide catastrophe. It is perfectly possible to have a life and even a party with friends without video or even any form of electronic entertainment. And no I am not going to regale you with stories about how we did it in the old days.
As Elijah is saying, some access points will obviously stop working if Plex service goes down. Accessing the remote web interface is one of them. But totally loosing the possibility to play your local media when something like this happens is definitely something that Plex does not want to happen in any client if it can help it. There are efforts going on trying to identify which parts are causing issues so they can mitigate it. For some clients it is likely a stupid bug. Some clients this is working perfectly in, but for example the AppleTV client did experience some issues which are now being investigated.
@jim® said:
Thanks Badgerdog! I am looking at Infuse right now.
Tell them about Emby instead.
