Hello, I’ve been experimenting with Plex for a while and am considering a recent offer of a discounted lifetime membership. However, I’ve run into a few things I’d like to know first before settling on this solution.
First, can this thing work offline? I have Plex server running on a laptop in our home (with attached media library). I use a PS4 as a player with the Plex app (sometimes iOS devices). However, the last time the internet was down for a while, I couldn’t get Plex to stream anything, as it seemed determined to phone-home or log-in or something, which it couldn’t do.
Does it always have to have an internet connection to function? I guess most of the time that isn’t an issue, but when the 'Net was out, it would have been nice to be able to watch a TV show or movie. It shouldn’t have to have an internet connect to operate. (Maybe see how Adobe Creative Cloud works… it authenticates the license from time to time.)
Second, are their other interfaces or views available (instead of the crude Netflix wannabe one that seems standard)? I’d just like an easy, pick my media type or library, sort/search in various ways. I don’t need a display full of ‘recommended’ content (which seems to display ‘R’ or titles alongside the Disney cartoons).
Third, I’ve used it so far for movies, but haven’t experimented much with audio or photo collection capabilities. How are people liking them so far? Does it make it easy to pull a music track or photo from the collection local (to take on the go)?
Thanks for the link! That’s a bummer (pretty much everything I’d use for a home media center is listed), but I guess iOS isn’t on there, so maybe iOS devices can connect if/when the Internet is down. I just don’t see why this would be necessary, but I suppose I can live with it.
re: skins - I’m not so much talking about skins as preference to have a whole different layout. Again, I suppose once I get the media properly categorized, and setup users/family-members, it might work, but I’m not crazy about the default layout, what’s shown, etc. (again, it seems to be trying to be like Netflix instead of a media library.)
I’ll have to experiment a bit with the audio and photos. What I want is to be able to browse the library (thumbnails for photo library), and then decide what to bring locally. If photos on the local device can be selected to be dumped up onto the master library, that’s great too. What I don’t want is some kind of auto-sync (which it seems all the services out there are dead-set on doing).
