I travel often and carry a USB drive where a lot of the media lives. I also run PMS on the laptop the drive is connected to, but I want to sync the content to my iPad which is much more convenient for watching on the planes/trains/etc. However, I can’t seem to find a way to get the laptop PMS server to be accessed remotely, when on a hotel network or elsewhere, and without it the server doesn’t show up in the list on the iPad. How do I do this properly? Or is there a way to sync without going out to the net and back to my laptop, just locally somehow?
That is probably caused by the Hotel WiFi. Hotels isolate their internet connections so that you can’t spy on the person in the next room, etc. Your best option is to bring your own mini router and connect via ethernet to the hotel. Then connect your laptop and iPad to your router.
I can create a private WiFi network on the laptop and have iPad connect to it. Same idea, right? Will have to test it out.
A private network could work, but you will still need internet access to verify your Plex Pass to allow the sync.
Does the verification happen every time syncing takes place?
Yes, it will verify the ability to Sync each time it starts. The transfer will occur on the local network. I’m not sure if you can drop the internet connection once the transfer starts, I’ve never looked into that.
Didn’t have any success. Plus, even with a mini-router, not all hotels provide Ethernet connections these days, just WiFi.
So from what it seems, there is no good way (if at all) to sync from the laptop locally, without punching a hole in the whatever router it’s connected to and then having the iPad go out to the internet and back to the laptop?
If you want to sync, yes you need some sort of internet access.
Fair enough, that’s fine. I guess I want to restate the question: both the laptop running PMS an the iPad are on the local network (in the hotel). Why can’t iPad see the PMS server in the Plex app?
That’s the hotel network. They isolate devices so they can’t see each other locally. It is a security feature.
So my best bet would be to have a mobile router that can plug into hotel network and create its own so the devices can talk to each other?
Yup, that’s my recommendation.
Another possibility, which I haven’t tried, is to use your phone’s mobile hotspot. Some hotspots are configured like a hotel (called ad-hoc) where devices can’t see each other. If your phone allows you to change it to “infrastructure”, that should work.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
