I’m sharing my movies with my friend. He’s watching it on an AppleTV latest generation. My internet speed is about 300 mbps download/10 mbps upload. His is about 120mbps/10 mbps upload. When my friend is watching his movies, under the Technical Details page, he’s only getting 720x540 @ 1.9 mbps on a 1080p movie.
His Video Quality settings:
Auto adjust quality - On
Home Streaming: Maximum
Internet Streaming: Maximum
Play small videos at original quality: On
His settings should be right. Do you know why he’s downloading at such a slow speed?
Getting around 2 Mbps sounds like a transcode. There could be two reasons for this transcode, one of which it sounds like you ruled out.
Commonly, people don’t change their client to increase remote streaming to Maximum, from the default of 2 Mbps. It sounds like they did that however, as “Internet Streaming” quality is set to “Maximum”. Good on that, but double check the setting anyhow.
Another possible culprit if a 2Mbps limit despite client settings is if they are unable to connect directly to your server. If your server’s external access is configured badly, they may fall back on using the “Plex Relay” system, which has a streaming limit. You can actually see this on your end if you go to your dashboard (click the heartbeat icon, click “Dashboard”) while they are watching. If there is a yellow ! icon on their panel, then point at it.
Have your friend try to force a maximum quality. Start playing a video, then go into playback settings and attempt to change the quality. If “Original” is not an option, then you are rate limited somewhere (most likely the relay).
Hi. Sorry been busy. I think found the problem. PMS says that Remote Access is “Not available outside your network.” The router’s UPnp is disabled. The router’s manufacturer recommends that this be turned off. Is it safe to turn this on?
UPnP is not recommended to be used. It allows devices inside your home network to punch holes in the router. If you get compromised by a virus, it can use UPnP to punch open even more holes, allowing even worse things to happen (such as letting the hacker themself into the network to do things like delete your files or ransom them back to you).
If you manually do port forwarding instead, it will work just as well as enabling UPnP, without the security issue of having UPnP enabled. How you do forwarding various from router to router, but you simply need to forward port 32400 to the IP address of your Plex server.
That’s exactly what I wanted to know Divideby0. I will manually do port forwarding and disable UPnP. Thank you so much for the great networking advice!
I must be lucky, in that my ISP-provided router uses DHCP reservation. That is, unless it needs the IP badly enough, it will reserve that IP for the particular computer for forever. Handy, for a network with far less than the 253 devices that my IP range can support.
I just rebooted my router and it’s off again. It comes on only when I hit the Retry button but it stays on only for a few minutes and turn off again. I do have VPN on the router. Do you think that’s why?
Yeah it’s my VPN. With VPN on, I used that tool and it doesn’t see anything on port 32400. When I turned VPN off, it sees it and Remote Access is green or on. Maybe I need to try and do what you did and bypass vpn with a split tunnel?
A VPN on your router essentially changes your home’s outside IP address, the IP that the rest of the world sees. On startup (and every now and then), Plex (the server) checks your home IP and sends that IP to Plex (the company). When someone wants to connect to your server outside the home, they need that IP. Plex (the company) has that IP, and sends it to the person, so they can find your server. If your home IP has changed in the meantime because of a VPN, then the connection fails.
Another reason VPNs cause issues, is that the VPN server you connect to essentially acts like another router. You had to do port forwarding on your router to get outside connection to work, so you need to port forward on the VPN as well. And most VPNs will NOT let you do that, so Plex won’t work.
Using split VPN might bypass all of this, allowing Plex to ignore all this complex stuff and connect directly to your home. VPNs add a lot of network complexity, so they don’t mix well with Plex.
Yeah it was too complicated with vpn. I just decided to put it on a different network without the vpn and no messing around with ip addresses required. So far, Remote Access remains green. Hasn’t shifted back to red yet so that is good news. Crossing fingers that it stays this way.
