I have been paying for Plex pass to have access when away from home but have yet been able to understand how to enable remote access. I’ve read through the instructions (which are like a foreign language to me) and skimmed through the manual of my router looking for all the abbreviations to see if it “supports.” I don’t even know what that means. I’m just a regular gal without the techy language. Is anyone available to help make it happen?
tip 1: You don’t need a Plex Pass to use remote access. You can use a mobile client of Plex without having a Plex Pass using the one-time app activation – however, if you have a Plex Pass, that’s covered. Here’s an overview of the features restricted to Plex Pass users.
Enabling remote access is supposed to be simple. When it comes to applying that to reality, there’s some roadblocks to evade.
The simple part…
- go to
Settings > Server > Remote Access - check if the function is enabled
That’s basically all you should need to do on the Plex side.
What’s more tricky is to troubleshoot the function if it doesn’t work right away.
In an ideal world, your router allows Plex to make your content available remotely right away.
In the real world, there’s some obstacles that could make this pretty painful.
If you have prepared Plex you can try to access your content from e.g. a mobile device with WIFI disabled. If the client can access your content… great.
If it cannot access your content we start the tinkering in the router setup – and this is more complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Option 1: You can check if there’s an option to enable “UPnP” (that’s the function Plex uses to make the content available). If it’s there but not activated by default, you can try activating it and check again if you can access your content from the disconnected client.
Option 2: You can check if the router allows “port forwarding” – if it does you can basically assign a loophole in your router through which the client can get through to the server. This will require to define a “port” through which the communication should go and afterwards making Plex aware of that (back in Settings > Server > Remote Access by activating the Manually specifying the public port option and entering the “port” number assigned in the router.
If you want, you can follow this and get back if you run into a wall or don’t find the router details.
What will help if you can provide a make / model of the router you’re using.
Just to be clear… when you said you read and followed the instructions of Plex, you refer to this support article?
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200484543-enabling-remote-access-for-a-server/
