Hey, I found a way to directly connect to the Plex server with any iOS-App (iPad, iPhone, …) with the server only having an official IPv6-address like it happens to be with DS Lite connections, which become more and more popular. I haven‘t found this solution anywhere else, so here you go:
As far as I know there are 2 main ways of reaching your server directly from outside your home network if you happen to suffer from DS Lite:
Both options work with the desktop and web app, but only the first one works with the iOS app but only with IPv6 connection on the iOS side!
How to make the second option work with iOS apps form IPv4 connections:
The trick is not to use the literal address like http://mappingsomething.myonlineportal.net/. Instead use its IP-adress equivalent. For this you need to enter the address of your portmapper for example here: IP Checker
In this case for example: 7.136.128.53
With this you are good to go. In Settings > Server > Networking > Advanced Networking > Custom server access URLs replace http://mappingsomething.myonlineportal.net:xxxxx/web with http://7.136.128.53:xxxxx/web or whatever your ip and portmapper-service is.
Of course this requires the IPv4 of the portmapper and your IPv6 not to change.
Indeed - IPv4 is not forwards compatible, so a client (a phone for example) with only IPv4 cannot connect to a server with only IPv6. Therefore you need the portmapper service (feste-ip.net, etc) that acts as a bridge to present a IPv4 server to the internet, and relaying the connection over IPv6 to your actual IPv6 Plex server.
mobile phone IPv4, server IPv4 → works automatically
mobile phone IPv6, server IPv4 → works automatically (your mobile carrier’s NAT64 takes care of the translation)
mobile phone IPv6, server IPv6 → construct your custom *.plex.direct URL (option 1 in your post), then it works
mobile phone IPv4, server IPv6 → you need a Portmapper/proxy service that does NAT46
Thanks for your answer.
What you say is totally true. The reason I was posting this, was that this didn’t work on any of my iOS devices and I didn’t know why (it worked on several PCs from the same IPv4 network):
By some coincidence I found out that using the IP-address of the port-mapping service like (feste-ip.net or myonlineportal.net in my case) and not the domain name it also works with the iOS-app. No idea why though - maybe some kind of DNS problem?
I don’t know how advanced the average plex server admin is but for me it wasn’t a big problem to setup.
Even though i don’t expose my plex server directly and run it behind a nginx reverse proxy. I can write for both cases a guide if needed.
Actually i think that is easier to setup than all solution that got mentioned here.
Getting your own domain doesn’t solve the scenario with IPv4 clients + IPv6 server though, you’ll always need a relatively complex solution (portmapper/proxy through a 3rd party server, etc) for that.
I can’t reach my Plex Server with IPV6-Only IP with the IOS Apps for Plex. It only works with a web Browser over DNS-Domain and port or with https://ip6-ip.serverid.plex.direct:32400. But the apps doesn’t work. How can I get the APPs (Plex an Plexamp) working with ipv6?
