I believe what they're getting at is an issue if they're not already authenticated prior to the outage. Then they'd have no access to their media unless they look into the workaround for that beforehand. It has been an issue in the past, especially when Plex's auth servers go down. I remember plenty of Reddit threads complaining about it.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

if you have to ask someone else to access your own [local] data, youre doing it wrong. ack

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 4 points 9 months ago

i wouldn’t say wrong… it’s SSO. i have multiple servers on my plex account, and i much prefer to have a single login for all of them than different for every server. it also allows things like login with plex for overseer etc

it’s a trade-off for sure, but i’d argue a very worthwhile one

perhaps you could argue that you should be able to run the auth server yourself, and sure… maybe… but i think that’s the worst of both worlds

[–] Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 9 months ago

Yeah this is pretty much it. When it first happened to me I had no idea and just wrote it off as a glitch. Then it happened again or the Plex servers were out so everyone was talking about it. There should never be a reason for your home media server to need access beyond the local LAN.

[–] d00phy@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

Ah, makes sense. Thanks.

[–] stratosfear@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 9 months ago

Ehhhhhh. I don't think anyone expects to be setting up their Plex server with an Internet outage. As long as you have been setup prior and you lose Internet you can still log in with the last local profile you used. It's not perfect but you're not locked out. No workaround (at this point in time) is necessary, assuming you've already authed and added your server to your "whatever" device.

And ultimately you just keep Kodi for the apocalypse. This complaint about "not being able to access your media" if the internet is out is misleading. Of course you can access your media if the internet is out, it just might not necessarily be with Plex which is ultimately an online service. Sure we can call it a limitation but that's just nit-picking since most everyone has their Internet up almost all the time, offline does work, and there's plenty of other ways to access your media.