Hello,
I’m thinking about setting up PLEX @home onto my FreeNAS. I don’t like the idea of ‘cloud’ and ‘friends’ etc. - I need only LAN sharing (those who are outside, would have an VPN tunnel with iptables controlled just for that situation). I know and have everything technically needed, but have almost no idea about PLEX ;-).
My question is: what is the minimal setup needed so I can share my PLEX media with my family via LAN? If I want to make use of the “controlled user accounts” (I’ve checked that already) - do I need to share publicly? I definitely want/need ONLY LAN sharing, no router port forwarding and similar, just LAN. Is it possible?
In a perfect world, I would like to:
- Create a local user like “mum”
- Configure a few libraries for this user
- Send my mum an email telling her “click here to open the libs I share with you” - where the server would show my local IP address (and I would assure she can connect into the jail box running PLEX with OpenVPN by a certificate)
Thank you for your inputs ;-)!
The ‘user restrictions’ and the server sharing over a public internet connection are independent from each other.
You can make use of the Plex Home feature without sharing your plex server over your internet connection.
Do keep in mind though, that introducing VPNs into the setup will make the matter much more complicated. You might wanna reconsider the VPN.
Plex by default provides a “DynDNS”-like infrastructure and a properly TLS-encrypted channel between Plex server and clients.
Thank you; any TCP port other than VPN is a no-go for me.
So if I understand you correctly: I can buy a plex-pass, setup a user for my mother and give her my LAN IP - is that correct?
Thank you :)!
@brumbear said:
So if I understand you correctly: I can buy a plex-pass, setup a user for my mother and give her my LAN IP - is that correct?
You don’t even need a Plex Pass if you can manage to separate your media by library. Then you can share or not share particular libraries to your users. I’d recommend you to try first without Plex Pass.
I cannot tell you how it is gonna work or if it is gonna work at all with your VPN in place. It introduces complications which are not easily resolved.
Just do a search here on the forums with ‘VPN’ and ‘problem’ as the search terms…
Thank you for taking the time answering - this forums are really nice :-)!
Well, if PLEX can work based on server IP (does it?), then I have no problems with VPN later. The question still is: can the IP of the server be entered and the user name/pass will be asked for? Like from browser-app or windows-player.
The other issue: I think I do need the plex-pass, as I can not add/manage the users otherwise :-(… It’s called “PLEX home” and I read already that the pass is required for that, when I’m correct. Or am I wrong :-o?
Thx
@brumbear said:
Well, if PLEX can work based on server IP (does it?), then I have no problems with VPN later. The question still is: can the IP of the server be entered and the user name/pass will be asked for? Like from browser-app or windows-player.
Yes, you can make this to work. But then every one of your clients will think it is in the same local network as your server (if they are joining your home network by VPN). Which disables the logic which is builtin already to decide what bitrate is allowed on a local vs. a remote network.
If you however can manage a “routed” setup with an encrypted “tunnel” between the local networks, then this will work.
The other issue: I think I do need the plex-pass, as I can not add/manage the users otherwise :-(… It’s called “PLEX home” and I read already that the pass is required for that, when I’m correct. Or am I wrong
For simple user accounts, you don’t need Plex Home.
But you need a working internet connection to plex.tv. Which is not easy to get right if you are using a VPN. All user authentication is done against plex.tv.
Here is the method how to share a server without having Plex Home
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/sections/200295083-Server-Sharing
This requires every one of your users to have a (free) plex account of their own.
You then only need to require user authentication even for local clients by putting this 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255 into
Settings - Server - Network - ‘Show advanced’ - ‘List of networks that are allowed without auth’
careful: enable this setting only after successfully signing in your server to plex.tv
Thank you @OttoKerner :-)! I’ll check that all later, but it seems to be the correct answers to my stuff ;-).
Currently I’m struggling with showing the filenames instead of the “Title” from metadata; oh man, such a basic thing! - instead of having some kind of checkbox/viewSettings, it seems to me I will have to hack the .py script to have the filename injected into the info structure. Or to insert the “Title” metadata into every file - both are a bit crazy approach for such a basic thing. The obvious use case: I have tons of say Czech films, which I know/play/use/grew up with as with the original CZ title. Now, having everything set to “CZ” (GUI, scraper, library…) it still feeds for a lot of the films the silly EN titles, which are totally new to me and I can’t recognize all my otherwise so well known movies :-(. This is totally crazy - bringing Plex into the game I loose completely control of the movies… The paradox is, that Plex can match (!) those files correctly; say a file is labeled (I guess you speak DE based on your nick) “Drei Eier” and the movie is now named “Three eyes”… - you get the idea ;-)…
PS: Shall I open another topic for this?
Thank you,
Andrej
Ahoj,
Bi-lingual users often create two or three different movie libraries, because the language in which the metadata are fetched is determined by the language of the library.
You could then sort your czech movies into a separate library.
(of course this requires that the metadata sources which Plex uses actually have czech metadata for your movies)
If there are only a few movies, one can also try to use ‘Fix Incorrect Match’. If you go to ‘search options’, you can define a language, which is then used only for this particular movie.
Hm - all I wanted was to have Plex use the filename for displaying/searching… No fancy multilang - I’m actually watching movies/audio without titles in EN/DE/SK/CZ/RU, so I rely always on the filename, which I know how I’ve set them. When Plex can’t find a localized title, why for heavens sake does it translate to EN?! When me and Plex - we both - know which movie it is, thanks to the localized filename, why does it screw up that???
Meanwhile, I bought a lifetime pass, to support this thing ;-). I like it somehow; but it’s also pretty dumb too, which is pity - today I wanted to find a movie, which I know is named “Die Sprache des Herzens” - now, Plex named it “Marie’s story” (this is really a PITA…) - and best of all, when I type “Marie” into search, it won’t find it; you have to write “marie’s” to have it whole! WTF… - am I missing something here? I mean: when you already find in EN-renamed IMDB title, the bloody software must support me a bit! I can’t believe I have to enter the whole word until it succeeds…
Pretty strange that such feature rich SW doesn’t implement most basic stuff… Does anybody listen somewhere where we can bag for stuff like that? I’m implementing 30 years SW and would code it myself it were open.
If you want a ‘stupid’ file list, then add all your movies into a Home Video library.
There, Plex doesn’t try to ‘beautify’ and look up titles or posters or any other metadata.
Once your Plex Pass is unlocked, you have access to https://forums.plex.tv/categories/feature-bug-voting where you can make a request to always have the metadata in original language.
Although this may be difficult, because none of the metadata sources Plex queries has them in all languages.
