I’m having an issue where I can’t play any On Demand videos from any of my devices (TV, Android) while connected to my LAN. The titles show up, I can click the Play button, the ads play back, but then the movie never starts playing. I just see a spinner/loading icon forever. However, I am able to play the same content if I disconnect from my LAN and use cellular data.
For anyone else seeing this issue, I found the problem and a solution.
I discovered that my firewall rules were blocking traffic from Plex.tv. The reason for this is that my Unifi firewall misidentifies Plex.tv IP addresses as coming from XvideosDOTcom - a p0rn site that I had blocked in my firewall config. I’m not the only one seeing this issue with Unifi, you can read some other posts about it on Reddit where someone else was having a similar problem.
The solution for this was to remove Xvideos from my firewall blocked list. After doing that, Plex TV On Demand works correctly. This is not ideal, but it does fix the problem.
