On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 2:54 PM, Jonathan Duncan <jonat...@bluesunhosting.com> wrote:
> I have tried it because a family member is using it. It is a great idea. I > currently already rip all my movies to a local drive and view them through > iTunes. But that limits me to Apple viewing. I have been considering other > options. > > Is there an option for local streaming instead of cloud streaming? I mean > for family members who want to watch some of my movies. Can they cache them > locally or host a backup of my movies and stream from their local cache? LAN streaming is one of the primary use cases for Plex. The reason you'd use Plex over some other LAN streaming system is that it does on-the-fly transcoding to deal with the supported formats of various devices and has apps for Roku, Fire sticks, various smart TVs, gaming consoles, Chromecast, etc. plus a client app for HTPCs. But for mobile devices, you can indeed use Plex to transfer (and even transcode to a supported format while transferring) to local storage on a tablet or phone, which is great for loading up movies for a road trip or flight. Plex also manages music libraries and does a terrific job of metadata scraping, especially when you have a PlexPass and use the premium music collection mode. You can cache music for offline playback too, with transcoding to suit your storage and playback needs, but the files are stored in such a way that they are awkward to use in anything other than the Plex app, which I find a bit heavyweight for music playback. There are other ways to accomplish most of the things Plex does, but it's by far the easiest and most integrated way to manage a media collection so that it's usable from just about any device and just about any network location. And most of these features are available in the free version, which gets continually better as PlexPass-only features are typically moved into the base system over time. Although they are working on more cloud-based stuff now, they're most strong in LAN-based streaming and sharing of collections between locally-hosted sites. Makes it really handy to access your own stuff over the internet. If you've already got a set of media files laying around, install the free version and give it a shot. It's amazingly simple to set up. --Levi /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
