I’d love it if I could stream directly off my Plex Server without needing an internet connection, just my intranet. Why?
Answer:
Thank you for this question. This is one of the tougher areas that comes up quite a bit for a lot of folks.
First - let me address local auth. We do not support local auth and have no plans to do so. I do recognize that there are many requests for this and that other personal media solutions provide this, however, it is an area that we have chosen to provide an online authentication for and will keep using that going forward. This does mean that we are choosing to not support a permanently local/offline Plex Media Server experience.
However - I can acknowledge that our handling of a less permanent offline state is not as solid as we would like it to be. We are exploring other authentication solutions such as, JWT authentication for PMS API auth that we hope will show us paths for providing much better support for intermittent or shorter-period offline scenarios for already authenticated clients. We have also started working to make the new apps more resilient to shorter-term offline states. We will continue this work and hope to create solutions that provide a much more robust temporary offline solution in a way that just works better for everyone.
Until we can get to that state - there are things that you can do to better enable a temporary offline state right now, but they are a manual function that you will need to prepare for in advance and setup while you have an active network connection. There are lots of posts about this in the forums - here is one from 2019 in the Tips, Tricks, & How-Tos forum area that might help some people get started here.
