Long time lurker first time poster…
What is the expected behaviour of manually specifying a media server?
I’m working on a project that will see a number of PMS deployed within the same network, with approx 15 RasPlex boxes used as Media Players for the content delivered from the servers. Due to system location the system will be totally off-line as in it will not and cannot have an internet connection of any sort.
The idea behind multiple media server is to enable us to restrict content by age rating of media delivered from the server, as I can’t see any other way of doing this as we are not able to support logons without an internet connection.
I was hoping to use the “manually specify server” to direct the RasPlex device to a specific media server to only deliver content from that server and therefore only age appropriate content for the person that has been allocated that device.
What I’m seeing is that the setting seams to do very little if anything, all content from all servers is available from the client regardless of how this setting is configured
So to start with I’d like to know what the expected behaviour of this setting is if anyone can tell me
Raspberry Pi 3B
RasPlex (official) Version: 1.8.0.148-573b6d73
PMS Version: 1.9.4.4325
Ah just realised that I have posted this in the wrong section 
if a mod could move it to the RasPlex section for me it would be much appreciated
When you mean “no internet connection”, its never ever ever?
because in that case I am not sure Plex its the best solution.
I have a school environment with + 20 devices with different content displayed and I handle everything though Plex Home. Yes, they need internet for longing in, but only the first time, then that user is remembered and internet isnt needed anymore.
Im pretty sure you will still need internet for the first handshake even on an offline enviroment.
Yes I mean “no internet connection” ever!
This has not caused us an issue so far, we have configured the networks on PMS to allow without auth and no internet connection has been present so everything from that side works.
So after a few hours worth of testing I think i have worked out the expected behaviour…
When the Client and server are are the same VLAN, this setting does very little as broadcast for discovery is still working so generally I was seeing both of my media servers, and their content/channels on the client. There were exceptions to this but I couldn’t get them consistently repeatable so I’m discarding them.
When you start to segment the networks up a little and broadcast for discovery starts to fail, this setting seams to come into play, and works exactly as expected 
you set a media server and the client talks to it.
So you place each server and client on a separate vlan?
I really dont like the fact that you need so many servers running at the same time
All the servers are on VLAN1, all the clients are on VLAN2.
I’m only looking at 3 servers to deliver the classification split of the published media. Also doing it this way means I can change a client’s “classification” via the cli, rather than having to connect things back to the internet and deal with the PlexPass login (which I assume you can only do from the client device) etc…
