Using Plex without the internet

General Discussions
1

I live in a very rural area and internet access is only available when I tether my iPhone to a Mac and then share my Ethernet to my wired /wireless home network.

With internet access everything works great, Roku, i Phones, i Pads, Macs and Windows 7 and 10 machines. I can connect with any of those devices and play movies, music, TV shows, all is great.

Turn off the internet connection thru my iPhone and I can no longer connect to the plex server thru any device except Roku. I did find some useful information on the Roku sites about this.

Why can’t I connect any other device to to my plex server without the internet. From the iPhone Plex app I try to connect using the direct ip address and the plex default port and every time on every IOS device I get Error 401

My home network is just fine without the internet connection as I can get to a backup iTunes server which shares all of my media content.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks

2

See this

Look into clients that do not require internet which looks like most of yours do based on that article.

so take windows 7, go into PMP go to “full screen” mode and set your local server and it should work.
You just need to find for each client where to specify your manual server so it connects locally.

3

I believe Plex requires internet access to validate account access/permissions & there isn’t a way around it — some people have used alternatives to Plex for this reason.

4

Thank you both for the replies.

Perhaps I made a serious mistake when I choose Plex to replace my iTunes/Apple TV media solution. The Apple solution works all the time. Since Plex is not an Apple TV app I decided to go with Roku.

This is a serious flaw in the Plex scheme that needs to be re-thought by Plex developers.