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)

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

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.

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.

There's a setting that tells it not to require authentication for clients on the local subnet. Pretty much everybody should set that.

How/why is that toggle not part of the configuration process during installation?

I can't really speak for the Plex developers. But as an ecommerce developer myself, I feel confident that the answer is that best practice is always to make the default settings the configuration that maximizes security protections. If you, the user, want to back that off trading security to get more convenience, fine, but it's on you, not on me.

Installation wizards ask the configurer to set various levels of security. It's not apparent that this option should be elided from any and all installation workflows.

Dark pattern?

What if I want different users locally?

The mobile app for Emby isn't as polished but I haven't had issues with local streaming.

It has an option to disable the login requirement for certain client IPs, or your whole LAN. Maybe it's erring in the side of caution, but most users just want to stream, disabling login in your LAN should be the default.

Enable DLNA in Plex and you should be able to play things from VLC

DLNA is a horrible experience compared to Plex, just above a network share. Did you know you can install Jellyfin and point to the same storage that Plex uses? That way you keep Plex (in case you bought the pass), and have Jellyfin as a backup.

Interesting

My main complaint with Plex is local searching is hit and miss - a little while back I typed in a string I knew was in the title of a file (confirmed using 'locate' in CLI) and it returned 'no results'

Plex does some wonky things, like missing external subtitles right there in the same video subfolder, or forgetting/failing to detect a compatible video file for some reason. My goto solution was simply to touch the files so Plex would think they were new and index them.

I used extf4 as storage, but changing to NTFS (yuck) has caused less issues. With the last version the search for subtitles is broken, but at least I can add them manually. I bought Plex Pass for life, but stayed with the free version because it's more stable.

I only had a brief test, but searching seems a little better since this update

I'm on the monthly plan because I wanted to play with GPU transcoding - despite what a lot of folks say it does work in Windows on an AMD iGPU, although I've switched to discrete now (previous server was Ubuntu, but Linux GPU fan control seems to be a mess and we all know the Nvidia driver saga)