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Yes, for a while Plex was usable without creating a SaaS account, but with some features blocked, and this (reaching the server from outside its LAN) was one of them.

(I say "feature" but of course what actually happened is that the plex developers decided to block requests from outside the LAN unless you sign up for their SaaS offering, which is kind of the opposite)

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Isnt that the main feature of Plex? Playing local files? Seems ridiculous to require this....

Plex works without Internet just fine, but very annoyingly to enable local streaming without Internet, you need internet.

Had to enable hot spot on my phone briefly when I had an internet outage. Annoying but now just works.

It has to be setup for local network streaming (and requires a network connection to do so the first time). Plex is far from perfect but its pretty much the best local media service I've found, so I'm not too mad at some of its idiosyncrasies.

Getting plex pass is a must if you use it regularly in order to support hardware encoding.

You need plex pass for hardware encoding? Wow that is a turdy way to get people to pay.

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