It really depends on the device. Some of the applications on devices like iPhones, Apple Tv, Roku, etc rely on the api provided by plex.tv. The api provides an XML of the available server URLs on your account. If you poke around the settings in these apps there is typically also a way to manually add a server which will eliminate the need for this look up. It will suffice for users who only care about local access, just be sure to set a static ip on the media server.
I’m not having any particular problems inside my network at this time but there are several things I do internally that likely affect that. For example I run my own DNS and a proxy. I also have GDM enabled in plex for local discovery.
My current gripe is with the Intel Drivers for hardware transcoding which appear to be quite unstable.
I have no idea as I don’t work for Plex, but the OLD versions before they added the " online " options always worked fine. I have set ALL the players in the Tivo’s and Roku’s with direct IP address, and I have the Synology on a STATIC ip of 192.168.1.246.
Still the issues keep coming back .
What I need from Plex is a link to the older versions of Plex Server for Synologe BEFORE the introduction of " online " content.
good theory, BUT all the players have the ip hard coded into them with the default port, also the Synology dns points to my PFsense firewall , and in the Firewall the ip clearly shows the name of the plex server morningstar666 with ip 192.168.1.246.
So when I refer to DNS I don’t mean the short names you might see through observe with netbios. There is a difference between these and what can be resolved using recursion.
If you have remote access enabled on your plex server then the first URL the client usually attempts to use is going to be a plex.direct uri. The URI looks similar to the one shown below but this is not a real URI.
The only way this goes away is if you disable remote access. Unfortunately to look at this you need a working server. You can see this by accessing the plex.tv api which appears to be working for me along with an access token. If you haven’t manually added the server to your client then it will use the plex.tv api.
If you happen to be able to reach https://plex.tv/api/resources you can access it using a token. You can find the token by viewing the meta data of a show as XML.
If you can access this end point then your server should be working. This is critical for clients and users trying to use plex.tv directly rather than their own server URL. Which believe it or not is more difficult to do than it appears due to single sign on and the way TLS is implemented.
You can also just try shutting off remote access and using a custom access URL. You can see if those help you out without checking the api.
