With the new media centric app layout it is impossible for me to use my local server while offline (which is all the time). I recently moved and cannot get a standard ISP where I live so I have a local network setup with no internet for streaming and sharing data. I have one plex server hosted and another one with all of my media locally. I use the hosted one to watch media while I am not home and my local server when I am home. With my phone connected to my local network (which does not have internet) I open Plex and since I had used my hosted server before, the app will only search for media on the hosted server which it cannot reach because I am offline. There is no way for me to tell the app to prioritize or use media from my local server under the Movies or Shows tabs in the Android app. It simply says that I am not connected and asks if i want to retry… If I was online, I could switch the server but I am not and cannot. If I disconnect from my local wifi and use mobile data, I could switch servers but can no longer see my local server as it is not online unless tethered… This needs to be fixed. Please add a way to manually select servers. I have been using Plex since the beginning and frequently setup Plex servers for clients of mine. This new Android app severely limits functionality for anyone in a non-standard network environment. It would be so simple to at least add a manual server selection option in the settings screen if you don’t want it to be part of the main UI.
+1 to this, with some more information about my use-case.
I have a plex server at home, always connected to the internet, no problem. However, we frequently go on long trips where we have no internet connectivity and want to take a bunch of media with us. My solution right now is to just not use plex for the trip because I can’t do what I want, which sucks because we lose track of where we are in series that we’re watching, and forget to mark episodes and movies as watched when we get home.
What I want feels like it should be possible with the android app today, but falls just short:
I want to take our one 10" android tablet with nothing on it, put it into TV interface mode, and use a remote control. This becomes our “TV”. Then, I want one or more other android tablets (which have massive SD cards) to be the “server” for the “tv” tablet. I want to be able to sync media from my server to the tablets with the big SD cards, and then have them appear as servers to the “tv” tablet to play the media.
All this seems like it is claimed to work, and indeed it works BEAUTIFULLY if everything is connected to the internet. If not connected, however, none of it works. The TV tablet can’t see the server tablets (even though I see the uPNP going around on the network). The server tablets can sometimes cast to the TV tablet, but the connection is super flaky, and I get some weird orange overlay on the tv tablet when using the remote, which I think is because the whole video field is “selected” or something.
Anyway, as a result, I don’t use plex for this workflow, which makes the regular usage of plex less helpful because I end up with two systems. I know people all want offline same-network connectivity between plex devices. Please give it to us!
