In an attempt to cull the various open ports on my home network, I am consolidating remote accessed services to a home vpn. I am using the ovpn server on an asus merlin router. And when I connect to plex via the home vpn from my android phone, some videos, namely the larger ones, just wont’ play. It will get stuck buffering for a bit then spew the error about connection having been lost. The only correlation I have been able to deduce is that it is mostly larger and higher quality videos that cause this to happen. Most of my anime rips in mkv format suffer from this, whilst archived youtube videos do not. I would almost suspect a problem with the transcoder, except there are also transcoded videos that do play. Noe that I am talking about on the fly transcoding, I do not have background transcoding enabled. Music on the other hand just plays fine.
Plex may be applying remote bandwidth restrictions to the playback due to the VPN network being seen as remote. You can ensure this doesn’t happen by adding your VPN network to the list of networks to be treated as local under Settings -> Network:
In my case, my VPN network is 10.10.0.0. So, when I’m connected remotely through my VPN, my phone has a 10.10.0.x address, and PMS will now treat it as a local connection (my LAN is 192.168.0.0).
Thanks mate, that seems to have fixed it.
Would you happen to know why this happens?
I didn’t even know plex had built in bandwidth limiters in this situation.
Plex uses network location information to determine the bandwidth available for streaming media. On local networks, it imposes no restrictions generally (by default) and the full speed of your link is available. Anything remote has restrictions applied as configured on both the client and the server’s remote access settings. If PMS determines that insufficient bandwidth is available to stream at original quality, the media will be transcoded to a lower bitrate to accommodate what is available. There’s some additional information available here:
