Have this TV in my RV, and using WD My Passport wireless pro as the PMS. worked great when I first tested at home (without an internet connection) but now I can’t find the setting which allows the player to operate without a live internet connection. Did this go away with a recent app update?
Not possible. The way Smart TV’s work, the apps are not actually installed on the TV. They are loaded from the cloud each time. Your best option is to get a device that actually installs apps and doe not need internet access like a Roku or Android TV device.
My 2018 LG WebOS TV certainly has locally installed apps. The built in media player works with no connection even when playing from the PMS. The Plex client on the TV on the other hand refuses to even start unless I am connected to the internet (which is how I realized the built in player will still work).
Of course it doesn’t make sense for apps like Netflix to be more than glorified browsers with no offline functionality. But apps like the builtin player should work without internet connectivity. And the Plex client really should too.
Correct, the apps that come pre-installed are special. Apps you “install” from the store are not and don’t actually get saved on the TV. That’s the way these Smart TV’s work, it has nothing to do with Plex.
Thanks guys makes sense. There must be just a stub resident on the TV. And I have verified that plex only phones home when loading. Roku it is
ok follow-up question. after further experimentation I have discovered that even watching a movie requires a live internet connection. at first I thought that once the plex app was itself resident on the TV that it would play content from my PMS via WiFi. But no–if live internet is lost during movie playback everything grinds to a halt.
is this LG phoning home and plex has to respect the LG environment within which it plays? the curious part of all this is that I can stream TV shows one after the other (from the same PMS) without live internet (except to start plex for the first time), but only the movie streaming appears to require it.
It shouldn’t matter if it’s a movie or a tv show. If one works, the other should too. In the LG app, there is an option to send logging info to your server. Please enable that.
Playback a tv show, le tit play for 1 minute and stop.
Then try playing a movie.
After it fails, grab the PMS logs and post them here.
well I can’t reproduce the problem anymore, after I turned on logging. maybe there was some LG-ism going on, unrelated to plex, and it was just coincidence that movies had the disease and shows did not. Its clear that the LG isms are frustrating me when there is no (or marginal) internet so I think I’ll just punt and go to roku and leave the smartness alone
