I’m trying to follow-up on this issue. Without internet, can you load the Plex app, then check the settings and tell me what version of the app you see.
5.10. It is mentioned in first post.
We’ve updated the version of the app that should be running. Try going online real quick and update the app you have and see if that helps.
Edit - To be clear, you can go offline again after updating the app.
Not really going to happen. @dimitry_ishenko do you want to test it?
Why not? You had internet at some point to install the app originally. Even a mobile hot spot connection will do. Again, you just need to update the app. You don’t need internet to use the app. It won’t call home if that is what you are worried about.
After I originally installed app and allowed internet access to Plex ONCE after about half a year it instantly broke and I was forced to spend 3 hours on analyzing TVs network traffic with wireshark to fix this.
Not to mention that Samsung has similar retarded policy on breaking old platforms by pushing faulty firmware updates, so I’m not interested in opening WAN port to these “smart” TVs. Ever.
I’m only keeping this thread open because other people have responded with same exact issue.
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Why the heck would it do that? It completely goes against the point of having a media server “at home” so you can watch your media when ever / where ever you want, whether online or not.
Thank god Orca’s little app still works.
Because company that owns this product likes big data and money, and with offline users that care about privacy you can’t sell services like plex pass. They do what’s in their interest, not necessarily user’s interest. It’s a shame tizen TVs can’t run any app because I would never use Plex.
For example if you want to stream music from plex to your phone away from home via vpn… well you can’t, because android application is designed this way so you must buy plex pass to unlock this missing feature.
I’m just waiting for big scandal where Plex sells information about copyrighted material of their users to some anti-piracy organization or the police. Tomtom already did this with traffic data of their users :^)
If something is free you are the product.
@szymon_dlu I’m not sure what issues you had before, but here is some info on how the Plex for Samsung app works.
The Plex for Samsung app has 2 modes. If the TV has an internet connection it will load the Plex for Samsung app from the internet from plex.tv. This is similar to loading the Plex Web client from app.plex.tv. This way you always get the latest version of the app with the latest updates. If there is no internet, it will load another version that is installed on the TV itself. This will be the version that is available at the time you installed the app. This is like loading the local bundled version of Plex web. This may be behind than the latest version and may be missing features.
The version you have installed now is an old version and has a bug dealing with offline usage. The latest version of the app has a fix, so you need to update the app to get this newer version installed onto the TV so that when working without internet, the newer version will run and the bug will be fixed. There is no way around the bug with the current version you are running.
The current version that I’m using is 5.10. I did update it to 5.29.1 by one time allowing internet access. This broke offline functionality and I was forced to work around this by forcing 5.10 back. Unfortunately this was not easy, because base version (available in samsung store) immediately updates after logging in. Fortunately I was able to selectively block network traffic from this app that is generated when attempting to update.
Both TVs are not supposed to be connected to the internet as Samsung also forces broken FW updates. Except these are harmful to the hardware.
Since then I’m using old 5.10 that works 100% stable and has everything I need. I see no reason whatsoever to update it now and I won’t do it. Especially not after seeing how efficient plex support is. Not even mentioning BS above about “offline mode never existing in Plex”. No thanks, I have no guarantee that this “new” version works same or better than 5.10.
Again and for the last time - I no longer have a problem. If you want your fix to be tested please address @dimitry_ishenko directly.
Oh, I know this is asking too much, but it’d be great if you could add option to disable updates in app UI. Forcing broken updates by overriding user’s choice to NOT update app via store preferences, not giving people a workaround and making them wait half a year is not nice. Especially if TV’s entire purpose is to only run Plex client.
5.10 is the older version. By itself it will work fine if you don’t allow it to ever connect to the internet. If you connect to the internet, it will load the newer version. This only loads the newer version, it does not update the installed version. You need to do that manually. If a newer version loads, that is where the bug happens. The newer version saves your user information differently from 5.10, so if you go back to 5.10, it doesn’t work properly offline anymore.
If you actually update the app, the bundles version will move up to 5.32. This version can read the user information properly regardless if you are online or offline.
So either
1 - stay on 5.10 and never go online (or block the update)
2 - update the bundled version to 5.32
We don’t/can’t control what the app stores do.
But you do control what the app does. And if I set app store to NOT update apps I expect apps to not be updated. It’s a shame one app’s developers came up with a great idea of relieving me of this choice. Not even netflix does that.
In the end it’s also user’s choice if he wants to provide internet access to the TV, so if you ever deliver a non-backwards compatible change in API that will prevent old versions from talking with online service you can just print this nicely to the user so he either updates app or continues to use it offline. Otherwise this application (or at least the part where you set “manual servers”) becomes unreliable and unpredictable.
I am away from my system at the moment, but I will give it a try hopefully in a few days.
As I said, it is not updating the app, just loading a different version. Also, our app has no info regarding the update status for the App Store.
update
verb:
/ʌpˈdeɪt/
- make (something) more modern or up to date.
It is updating the app. As I mentioned - I know this is asking too much, so we can just stop this right now.
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