Hello,
I’ve been banging my head against a wall for a while now trying to figure out how to configure plex to access my content outside my home network. It used to work flawlessly, but just stopped one day.
My ISP is Verizon FIOS, I have a CR1000A router. I have a Synology NAS DS418 with (2) 4TB WD Red drives and (2) 8TB Segate Iron Wolf drives (the WD drives are due to be replaced, I’m just saving money for it now). I have plex media server installed on my NAS, and locallly I have no issues viewing my content via the plex app on several firesticks. My content is almost all 1080p, a mix of h264 and h265. I didn’t realize h265 doesn’t play well with so many devices.
Outside my network, I get massive buffering on my cell phone and my friends also get buffering via their firesticks it make viewing h265 files impossible and h264 severely compromised. They used to work. I have been to these users houses and have access my stuff in the past.
This is what I tried.
I bought plex pass yesterday. I setup a new instance of Plex Media Server on my desktop PC so I can take advantage of hardware transcoding. I point the server on my desktop at my NAS where the files are stored.
Connected to my local wifi, everything works, I can even utilize hardware transcoding for h265 files locally through my PC to my phone without issue.
The problem comes from remote access. I have tried split tunnelling and I’ve tried NordVPN meshnet. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I think I have meshnet configured correctly, because I can turn off wifi on my phone, connect to my desktop media server through my phone over 5G and stream movies. On my PC, I can see the files being hardware transcoded and sent to my phone. However, my friend cannot stream. He can see the name of my PC’s media server “Plex Via Desktop” and the names of my library, “Remote Access Movies” and “Remote Access TV”, but there is a triangle with an exclamation point on both of them, so clearly, he’s not connecting. I assume it’s becuase he’s not connected to my meshnet, but I’m not sure if that’s correct. I would like to avoid connecting him to my meshnet if possible. If I HAVE TO connect him to my meshnet, I don’t know how to do that.
Any help would be appreciated. If you’ve made it this far, even if you have nothing to add thank you.
I just don’t use a VPN on my server computer. Nord is difficult to setup for what you want. You may want to look into different VPNs.
If VPN’ing maybe consider the Docker based approach and VPN’ing just the container that you need to do that for; this will leave the Plex container to run as vanilla as possible from a network perspective.
There seems to be a little confusion about VPNs coming from your post.
First of all, take a look at this guide: https://meshnet.nordvpn.com/how-to/remote-files-media-access/set-up-remote-plex-media-server
This will get you going in no time with remote access.
Now for the VPN part. Commercial VPNs, such as NordVPN’s core service, are generally used for outbound traffic, and while you can use NordVPN and Meshnet at the same time. Meshnet is responsible for the remote access part.
Yea, I don’t want to use a VPN on my server computer, but it’s my ONLY computer (aside from my synology NAS). When I put my NAS together 2020 I really didn’t know what I was doing, otherwise I would’ve built it from a PC instead of synology box.
I’ve heard people talk about dockers before, but I don’t really ‘get it’. Any idea where I could find a useful tutorial?
I know how lazy that sounds, but it’s difficult to research when you don’t even know what questions to ask…
Thank you for taking the time to clarify. I will l review the link you posted. I appreciate your reply!
Here’s a tutorial playlist on YouTube that will get you started and covers all the tips and tricks a lot of people leave out or forget. This will work for any device and uses portainer to manage everything.
NAS Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIV5krueYo8B0oQXKPay0POUIxV2Gy50v
So, full disclosure, I am a Windows guy, and I have my PoC Plex running off of a RaspberryPi - but its been so successful that I am looking at doing a clean full build out, however, will be using Unraid / Linux as the OS. Docker on Windows seems a bit unreliable from what I am reading. However, if you want to go down that path, what I would do is have a convo with ChatGPT on the benefits of Dockers in your situation - I think of them as a nice middle-ground between full blown VMs and simple executables. Also, this seems like a reasonable tutorial, and there are a ton of them out there: Plex Docker Compose: KICKASS Media Server with HW Transcoding | SHB (smarthomebeginner.com)
no worries. if you have any questions I’m happy to help here or through DMs
Just a heads up, I dont think that the NAS DS418 supports Portainer / Docker Any way to run docker on the DS418? : r/synology (reddit.com) - you’d likely need to go this path on your desktop