That nvme drive just hanging out next to the power cord is giving me a type of anxiety I never knew I had, thanks.

A smallish (6U) rack mount that you can bolt into the wall. Even if they rip it down it’ll weigh a ton and have locked doors (with ventilation obvi).

It means the same specific subnet. If you have multiple subnets (one for wired, one for wireless for example) it will also trigger that limitation unless you go in and manually tell it hey these are local.

lol crap, it’s the new arch!

You can absolutely run plex in a local only mode. You don’t sign it in to an account and then set your subnets in the local networks section like so. Or leave it blank if you have a standard flat home network.

I bought a plex lifetime pass for $100 over a decade ago and I never see ads like this. I only occasionally get the notice for plex pro week and stuff like that.

They’ve added commercial supported live channels like many other free services but yeah, it’s lacking compared to others. Pluto.tv is my go-to if I want to throw something on at a family members house or something like that. Owned by the networks, reasonably short ads, completely free. Too bad they didn’t figure that out 10 years ago lol.

Having to set up a reverse proxy is basically a non-starter for most people, while I’ve talked extremely non-technical people into running Plex since it just works out of the box.

Plex will do the exact same thing if you have an episode earlier in your history that didnt get marked as “watched”. But plex lets you manually tag episodes as watched which usually fixes it. Maybe there’s a similar option in jellyfin?

Plex is entirely free and completely local, but only if you don’t use the features that make it so convenient (the relay server they offer, authentication and authorization, etc). Things I’m pretty sure jellyfin doesn’t provide at all. If people spent half the time reading as they do trying to convince people to get angry at optional features then maybe we wouldn’t have so many posts like this.

Are you runnin multiple subnets? If so you need to enable them all as local nets in plex or else it’ll trigger this.

worth mentioning that any intel cpu with an iGPU from generation 7 (kaby lake) and up can handle 4k hevc transcode in hardware. i just upgraded my plex box to an i7 8700K and it works quite well. an old office workstation with like a 9th or 11th gen intel cpu would probably rip through transcodes.

Caveat: I am not a programmer, just an enthusiast. Windows programs typically package all of the dependency libraries up with each individual program in the form of DLLs (dynamic link library). If two programs both require the same dependency they just both have a local copy in their directory.

Plex has pretty bad DV “support” as an example. AFAIK it will only play back dolby vision profiles that have the HDR10 compatibility mode or whatever. Any time I get an older DV file I have to play it through some Android TV app.

Ease of setup was how I just got one techie friend and two non-techie gamer friends to set up Plex servers and we had libraries shared to each other within 15-30 minutes. I don’t want to think about explaining VPNs and SSL to them for the alternatives.

Plex still offers that option, it’s just buried in the settings.

i’m not sure why it would do this, i’ve never had any issues with watching plex while the internet is down (in fact that was one of my original uses for it, to have movies and tv in a building without internet). I don’t have it turned on but I do know you can go into server settings -> network and set a list of IPs/subnets that can access without any authorization at all. That lets you use plex without even having a plex account afaik.

As a techie I hate this answer but it’s hard to beat a Roku with Plex from an ease of use standpoint. My 70+ year old parents have no problem navigating it.