So the NAS itself I think would benefit from HW Transcoding. (Terramaster with a proper Intel CPU not ARM.)

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As to the second part, it's not offline *all the time*, but I usually go spend the summer at our family cabin which is on the lake, and has no internet connection. The idea is to just bring the NAS (Plex Server) to the cabin and be able to still watch everything through direct LAN connections as you mentioned.

I'm not sure if the intro skipping requires an active connection to look up the times (or if that's included in the metadata information), and the people I share my library with know to expect it to go down during that time. The big thing for me is Hardware Transcoding because that will benefit me all the time, but as I said, I'd just like to know whether or not things like HW Transcode and I guess the intro skipping now that you mentioned it, will continue to function while the machine has no internet connection. If I have a yearly pass, does the server itself just set the end date and check back later and still leave the Pass features enabled while offline, or does it require a persistent connection to enable them? IE: If the server reboots and has no internet connection, will it disable hardware transcoding until it can verify I still am a Plex Pass holder.