So you are saying use my phone as a hotspot for internet connectivity, but have the laptop still be the “local” server in the car that the other devices connect to and stream from?
exactly. i use a shield but you can do with a laptop the same. i run it as a separate server from my main server at the house.
Shut the server down at your house. give it power in your car. connect it to your hotspot. Connect other devices to hot spot. turn off remote streaming to ensure no one accidentally remote streams something for whatever reason. Everyone should be able to connect locally in the car. Once you are at the destination that has wifi they can just use the remote stream from your house or you can connect the server to the wifi there but you’ll often get relay connections so you need to turn remote streaming back on in the server.
Just make sure the server is already running at your house and has done its maintenance, thumbnail downloads etc. if so, it won’t use hardly any internet while in the car.
also make sure your kids aren’t streaming the free content served by plex or that will use internet.
So the phone (mine or my wife) becomes the DHCP server for all the devices in the car - they then “pass through” to the laptop running the plex server and stream from there…if that works then I wish I did not buy the Beryl AX Router!! 
i’d test it and test it with multiple streams running at once from different devices. there are many things that could screw it up from work or it may work right off the bat.
you can also tether your phone to that router if the phone has limitations that don’t allow local clients to talk to each other or if the load of 4 streams is too much for the phone to handle.
Yeah - so that kind of worked. I wonder if the hotspot on the Iphone can handle multiple streams. I connected my Fire tablet 10" and am streaming a movie there. I have an older IPhone 7 that I connected and it is choppy streaming another movie. I then connected a new Iphone SE and it is streaming on that fine. So could the 7 not be able to handle it - being an older phone? EDIT: check that - switched account on the SE and now that is choppy. Interesting. All three movies are 480p. The IPhones are Direct Play and the Fire Tablet is Direct Stream.
Thinking that since I have the router, might just use that - plenty of bandwidth. I just need to ensure the devices are setup account-wise before we get in the car. Worst case I use a phone as a hotspot for internet to do some account switching if necessary…
i use android devices and haven’t ran into that issue. main reason i said to test.
i’m not sure you can tether an iphone to the router but maybe. you can on android. That would let your router handle the streams between the laptop and the devices but also allow for internet connectivity so everything can be authenticated.
I find the using plex while offline as a pita that leads to headaches all along the way. but some people seem to have got a good set up running and working well. i was never able to accomplish that.
but maybe those people don’t have managed accounts or are doing something different than how i wanted to do things. Either way, good luck!
Yeah - wish there was better support for off-line model. I will just need to test / explore the managed accounts and caching aspect on devices and see how it works. Worst case is just a single account and I remove the R-rated movies from the library - reality is the kids are the only users in the car.
So having a dedicated " road trips" laptop as the plex server and the standalone router is pretty simple to maintain - just the account aspect to figure out…
at least my findings will help someone else who wants similar setup - not having the kids self manage content and “forget to download” before trips or not have enough space on their device. This way also allows me to have cheap and simple devices for them - basically a “dumb client”.
an issue you may have with a single account is tracking what you are watching. if they are just watching the same content over and over its fine.
Yeah - this is just for the kids in the car - not too worried about tracking who watches what - worst case I have to remove the R-rated movies from the library.
i was referring to tracking where you are in content. if they are watching tv shows and want to keep track of what episode they are on and where they paused so they can pick it back up where they left off.
if they don’t maintain their account while watching then it cannot sync there watch history. But that often doesn’t matter with younger children or people just watching movies.
For makemkv when you are looking at the file structure you will need to look for the largest file size item. So for DVDs usually you will see either 4gigs or up. So unselect everything and then select the one track that has the largest file size. Then use a program like vlc to view the file.
If it plays the movie then awesome you got it.
Ryuzaki_2 - thanks - I finally figured that out. So for every movie I have a mkv file and I am using Handbrake to create a mp4 version of the file. Figure between the 2 types I should minimize the transcoding that needs to be done and keep the processing needs on the laptop down.
I am looking to get a couple more Fire 10" tablets for the kids - now to determine what format they use and figure out how to ensure that plex is using that…
cool cool. This is the way. 
Plex supports just about everything so you don’t need to worry from that side. See this linked page for details Plex Supported Media Formats
Ugh - when I am on the local network (mini router which is what I will have in the car), my iphone won’t connect to the Plex server - says offline. (IPhone 13 running iOS 16.5 (20F66) )
When the server and the phone are on my home network (with internet) it works.
I loaded Plex app on another iPhone (brand new SE) and it works - because I got and see the phone’s settings - privacy & security - > local network - > Plex is listed and enabled.
On my iPhone - Plex is not even an option there. Reinstalled the app several times - no luck.
Any thoughts?
Please provide the requested Plex app log in this thread. None of the users in there has so far produced logs, so investigation into this issue cannot commence.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Cant grant permissions to access local network on new iPhone
A post was merged into an existing topic: Cant grant permissions to access local network on new iPhone
