We are exploring the thought of using Plex as a tool to throw Presentations to TV’s at our workplace. I have some questions about the ability of the software and also which tier of service I would need to purchase, if it is possible to achieve the below.
I want to be able to run presentations on TV’s that our not in our local location. Is this possible? I need to be able to start the presentations in our Warehouse from our Office location about an hour drive away. At this time the two networks are not joined together and operate independently. Is there a way I could give a Roke stick a static IP and port forward from our Public Address to it so Plex can see it?
Or is there another way you would suggest for me to use Plex to achieve this?
Someone at your remote location can start the video from a roku, chromecast, or other device hosting the Plex client. The server can be located at your home office. Just make sure you’re port forwarding and firewall is configured properly. Also, you may want two different accounts. One for the media server, that has admin rights, and a separate one that is “friends” with the administrator account and has shared library access.
When you say “presentations,” do you mean live delivery? Plex is primarily designed as a media server, which would mean that your presentations would most likely need to be pre-recorded. If you’re looking to deliver live to participant TVs, there is probably a way better option out there than Plex.
Also, for tiers of service, there’s only Pay or Not Pay. Not really sure if any of the PlexPass features would be ideal in this scenario.
Plex doesn’t really seem like a viable business solution for delivery, unless everything is pre-recorded.
I should have been more specific, our presentations are pre-recorded. Often they are greeting messages and company informationals created in PowerPoint and streamed as video files. I guess my questions was can someone stream to a TV or Roku Stick from an outside network connection to those internal devices, I believe seidler82 says this is possible as long as I have my ports forwarded to allow the connection.
In this case would I give either the Roku/TV a static IP and then port forward to that device? This will allow the Plex server externally to pickup these devices and play the videos from the Plex Client remotly?
The port forwarding would occur on the server side. I would leave the Roku device as dynamic as possible as I assume you won’t know all of the possible network configurations of your target audience, assuming this thing gets passed around a bit? If so, network settings would be reset anyway in almost every instance. If it’s unpredictable, it’s best left dynamic.
Part of the glory of the Plex service is that it ties together the server and client based on accounts and permissions, leaving most of the technobabble out of the equation. I’m assuming your server side is a little more complicated than your home network, so odds favor some work will need to be done there.
On the client side, you’d need a static account for the Roku and preset up the account that ties correctly to Plex before you send it out.
In your scenario, Plex could work as a delivery system. I’m actually considering similar business scenarios where I work for delivery… and this is a pretty big company. Control over the libraries could make it quite useful.
