I’ve been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” Based on that I don’t think Plex qualifies.
Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my “friends” were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.
Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.
So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?
Well, grammatical quibble then.
Your verbs are present tense and not past tense:
This gives the impression that you’re talking about the current state of things. Which seems to be the above commenter’s issue.
Where as:
or
Would imply a past experience.
Misinformation doesn’t mean that you’re intentionally lying (that is disinformation), it just means that you’re stating facts that are not true.
(I’m not being negative, just pedantic lol)
To actually contribute to the conversation:
Plex now allows local network streaming without their servers being offline as long as your client is already authenticated (cached tokens have a short expiration date however)
Alternatively, you can add your LAN’s subnet in Settings > Server > Network > ‘List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth’
Here’s a full written guide: https://forums.plex.tv/t/howto-use-plex-with-no-internet/383325