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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Back in June an animal chewed through the fiber line to my house. It took AT&T three trips and five days to fix it.

In those five days I became acutely aware of how internet dependent my home automation is. I vowed to no longer invest in home automation that requires non-local access.

This will definitely help accelerate the process.

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This post by Home Assistant's founder seems to call out to users like you very much: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/04/05/your-hub-shoul...

I found Home Assistant after being burned when Google bought Revolv. I spent $299 on a device that google literally bricked when they acquired the firm and had no recourse. It started out just controlling my Sonos speakers but now controls a whole Zwave mesh I've been slowly building throughout the house.

The only real downside of Home Assistant is just how active the community really is. Each upgrade is a huge avalanche of changes and they're occasionally (but documented) breaking. Do yourself a favor and use Hass.IO (https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ ) to manage Home Assistant upgrades and backups. It is really nice.

Edit: changed "dearth" to "avalanche" thanks to braindeath for the cluebat.

> dearth

Dearth refers to scarcity. Maybe that’s what you meant, but it didn’t sound like it.

Indeed. I had a brain fart apparently (and have updated it crediting you here). Thanks!

he mentally searched for a word and accidentally took the antonym of what he wanted.

Correct

Ever tried to use Plex? Your media's "right there" on your local network but you can't play it without internet.

There is a setting in Plex that will allow it to work without authentication for any devices connecting from a defined subnet. So I just set this to my home network's setup and can use it without issue whether I have an Internet connection or not.

I confirmed this when I tested my Plex server on a Raspberry Pi out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and it streamed fine without an Internet connection.

Which, for anyone who has learned the hard way, has to be enabled before your internet goes out.

...help a brother out, what is this setting? I can't find it.

I believe he's talking about Server Settings > Network > List of IP Address and networks that are allowed without auth

thanks I'll check it out

Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely check it out!

Wow! I have no words. This is the example how home automation should not be done.

Use Emby instead... or do not use the Cloud Auth from either.

Local Auth only.

Jellyfin is the open source fork of Emby, for those looking for an open solution.

I haven’t updated plex in several years. Is this new-ish behavior?

ditto Chromecast (with local media)

I thought it did work with local media, no? Did it used to?

AirPlay seems like a good local alternative, but I’m hesitant to fully invest in it because it would lock me into Apple products and I fully hate to be locked in, despite having an iPhone at the moment.

It works with local media, but requires an internet connection to initiate the stream (by connecting to Google's servers)

Emby is a slightly less polished, slightly more open alternative.

And Jellyfin is the open-source fork, since Emby went closed-source.

I need to do more research on that. The people behind Emby seem to understand and are trying to minimize the blow-out by making 'as many features in stand alone open source modules as possible'.

Jellyfin is an open source fork of Emby. I've been trying it out after the Plex mobile app "forgot" I paid for it, and will be migrating over soon. I haven't used Emby so I can't speak to the differences, but it seems to work very well. In some ways it's even better than Plex- turning on subtitles doesn't seem to hit performance as hard

I just checked, and Plex happily played my local media with my internet connection powered down. I'm using Plex 1.16.5.1554 running in a jail via the FreeNAS plugin and playing from a Roku Stick+.

Only hiccup was the Roku client took unusually long to bring up my list of local content; I could imagine it timing out on DNS connections.

I've never connected it to the Plex servers ("associated it with my Plex account"), perhaps thats the difference?

Oh that's cool. This happened to me a few years ago, we'd moved house in December and had no internet all Christmas/new year due to all the contractors being on holiday. I was emotionally scarred enough to still remember it today!

Maybe that behaviour's fixed now, or maybe I just hadn't found the setting mentioned in the comments below.

To answer your question, yes it appeared to be attempting to authenticate with their servers, even though my Plex server was local

As others have said this is incorrect. I live in a bus and sometimes stay in places with a bad phone signal / slow internet connection. I download Youtube videos to my local file server and watch them via Roku and Plex in these cases. It works fine offline. Roku warns you before launching the Plex app but it works fine.

I have been at pains to tell managing agent that a "upgrading" our security gates to use GSM as trigger to open is not an upgrade from the standard remote. We are just introducing a whole lot more failure points.

Use a mobile phone as your backup?

That is in fact what I did. Set my hotspot to be the same as my house.

But the range won’t cover the whole house and then I can’t use the phone.

I mean use it as a gateway. Then the rest of your house is covered by the same WiFi, but you have a metric set so that if the normal internet works all your devices use that, but when it goes down they all use the phone.

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