If you have any managed home users, it will always require sign in. You must be the only profile on your Plex account for this to work. Some examples of workarounds:Īuthentication - Whitelist your subnet and the loopback address for authentication. There are workarounds for most of these, but it was never designed to be used completely offline long-term, so I would not rely on it working. Anyway, Plex can be configured to work offline in the event of a network outage, but it might not work all the time, and you will occasionally need it to be able to go online every once in a while so it can phone home, renew its certificate, refresh tokens, update metadata, etc. You can find some themes for kodi that are more similar to Plex if you want.

Like you say, this really is the use case where Kodi would shine. But, my family is already familiar with the Plex interface, so I'd really like to stick with Plex instead of Kodi. And I also realize I could use different apps (and I set up Kodi on the Shield in the meantime). I realize this isn't Plex's main use case. But, that would mean I'd still have to start up a mobile hotspot every time I want to use it. As long as it *initially* has an internet connection, Plex will launch and I can keep using it after cutting off the network (except for the home screen- that just hangs with a blank screen). The Plex app won't launch without an internet connection. I've tried disabling authentication on local networks, identifying the whole 192.168.1.1/16 subnet and the loopback address (127.0.0.1). Sometimes the Shield would be connected to mobile wifi, but it would be nice to not always have to do that for a variety of reasons. My use case is that I'd like to use the Shield in my minivan, hooked up to the rear entertainment system for movies. Is is possible to use an Nvidia Shield as an offline, standalone Plex device? So, it would act as both the server and the client. I know this has been discussed before (or at least variations of this question), but I've found conflicting comments on whether this is possible.

Plex on nvidia shield