Maybe it’s a silly question, but I could not find anywhere how this works in detail.
I have disabled remote access, but I can still watch my content from app.plex.tv when directly connected to my local home network (the same applies for the Android app). When outside my local network (e.g. mobile network) the content is not loaded.
How can this domain (app.plex.tv) access my content from my local Plex server when I have disabled remote access? Because this would mean my content is streaming through Plex’s servers?
I know my local Plex server (and it’s IP address) is configured in my Plex account, so it knows where to look for. Does the Plex Web App (plex.app.tv) then access that IP address automatically or how does this work?
If so, then probably it polls the video contents from my local server, but does the external Plex server then retrieve my local content (which I don’t want) and then send it to the browser or does it all stay within the browser? (Is this a certain technique, to stream contents of another server in a frontend web app without sending data back to the Plex servers?)
I hope my question is clear. I would like to know how this works a bit technically, because I think it is interesting.
In fact all you do is to load a web app into your browser session.
The web app will run in your local browser and attempt to connect to your server(s) or serves shared with you. If you’re in your home network, the web app running in your browser will be able to see your local server (locally).
None of your library or media is transferred into the internet.
There’s a number of lookups to the internet when Plex is checking your account settings or loading online media sources (e.g. podcasts, news, live tv streaming, video on demand…).
So when you enable remote access by port forwarding the local server, then the web app can also find the server on a mobile network for example and the same concepts still apply? (No content is streamed to the Plex servers)
Because I’ve read something about Plex Relay and I thought that that will be enabled when you enable remote access or am I wrong? If so, can you explicitly disable the relaying function?
Correct. Your server publishes some information about its public address alongside your account for the clients to more easily establish a connection. Those connections are established directly between each client and your server.
There’s only one exception.
If your remote access isn’t properly configured and the client fails to establish a direct connection you can use an indirect connection, a so called relayed connection. This will route the traffic over a server of Plex (proxy relay).
There’s some use cases where this is necessary. Usually it’s an indicator of a bad remote access setup.
The option to use relayed connections can be enabled/disabled on your server by checking/unchecking Settings > [Server Name] > Network > Enable Relay.
Bandwidth through such a relayed connection is limited to 1 Mbps (2 Mbps for Plex Pass members).
