Forgive me for asking perhaps a real simple question, but I currently have a Plex server running on a dedicated desktop for my whole house network. A friend of mine doesn’t have Plex and I’ve filled up a portable USB drive with around 5TB of stuff. Now I would like to create a Plex server on that drive so that he can just take it home with him, plug it into his own laptop, and run the server from there, broadcasting to his Roko clients in his house.
First of all - does that sound reasonable? Second (and most importantly) can I just download the server software, set it up on that portable drive, and test it on my own laptop (as a secondary Plex server)? I’ve just had Plex running for so long with no fussing with it I don’t even remember how I set it up in the first place, so pointing me in the right direction would be a big help.
A USB drive is just for storage. Plex needs an operating system to run on
He can just install his own Plex server on his laptop, connect the USB drive to it and then watch the media on any Plex app he wants to in the house. Tv, phone, or straight off the laptop
Or, you could enable remote streaming and he could just watch your Plex server from his house
Well, neither of those options are good - my friend isn’t technical at all, and lives a few thousand miles away (and trying to do remote streaming doesn’t even work well when my neighbor is only a few houses away - most likely because all my files are 4K files around 20GB at the smallest).
I was hoping to have Plex “run” on that drive when he plugs it into his Windows laptop, the same way I can install, say, Photoshop to a portable drive and then just start it up. If I give him all this media I doubt seriously if he’d even SLIGHTLY be able to get Plex up and running on his own laptop (think of it this way - he doesn’t even do email well, being mostly comfortable with Facebook and messaging through there).
Perhaps I’ll forget about Plex for him and he can just get something other than Roku that has it’s own media management system (like the Nvidia) and plug the drive directly into it (he can’t even get it to work from his television because, again, technically challenged).
