yup--the weekend my internet went out was a real eye-opener and a number of things in my house got the axe including plex. i use kodi now and while its UX is nowhere near as good as plex, at least it works with a LAN-only connection

Oh definitely, once you connect it to an account it nearly refuses to work locally. I tried to set up a cloud-based Plex instance once and I connected it too early, breaking it because UPNP/port forwarding didn't work (yet) and local access was auto-disabled. Even enabled it only half-worked.

Interesting - I don’t have any issues accessing my server without internet, the default for me seems to be run local and then via internet.

I’m currently not logging in while using plex. Just providing that datapoint

edit:

You can also do this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...

It is very client device dependent. And I found that when my internet went out, most devices would not work. But after several hours and some restarts it finally started working on some devices. I think this was because of some dns caching issues.

Are there alternatives with smart tv apps?

Jellyfin has an official app for Roku but I am not sure about other platforms like webOS.

It appears it does exist: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-webos

No app for webOS (although emby exists). You can, of course, use the Web player over your local network.

Just released on Official store. https://jellyfin.org/posts/webos-july2022/

Wow, they literally released it a few days after I checked for it :D

But full functionality on Roku is really lacking. They really have not put too much into the Roku client and made the Amazon client way better.

Emby is close, it missed some video features last I checked but it may be good enough for you.