Outgoing Proxy Support

Feature Suggestions
1

Since moving to China, and living behind the great firewall, I’ve had to set-up a fairly complex network set-up to continue my previously cord-cut existence.

I would love for Plex to detect and use outgoing proxies on Linux. Although $http_proxy is set on my Plex server (1.7.3.3937 running on Linux ubuntu 4.4.0-81-generic), Plex refuses to use them.

This unfortunately makes many of Plex’s lovely features not work sporadically depending on the wall.

  1. Metadata updates frequently fail requiring me to refresh them, unmatch matches and fix match content again
  2. Disable trailer viewing preventing that cinema experience for movies we haven’t seen before
  3. Unable to view trailers when deciding what to watch next
  4. Unreliable viewing of channels, such as my personal favorite HGTV where one day it plays like a breeze, the other it freezes for 10 seconds every 5 seconds.

Please add outgoing proxy support. It should be such a simple feature, and would make my life certainly much better :slight_smile:

Thank you!

P.S. I’ve seen one similar request to this, but it had tons of feature request in a single post. It’s scope was also far above what I’ve requested. Many of the features requested in the earlier post are easier implemented in intelligent proxy configurations (e.g. squid’s tcp_outgoing_address coupled with acl dstdomain) / Linux’s source routing / openvpn or strongswan / Linux’s many network tools. Keep things simple, I’ll take care of the rest :smiley:

2

I might be misunderstanding your issues, but…
Can’t you use the Custom server access URLs setting in PMS to point Plex to the correct domain/IP?
(Settings → Server → Network)

I have a remote PMS that I put behind a reverse proxy using NGINX and in the Custom server access URLs I put https://mydomain:443 in that box and Plex works fine

REF: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200430283-Network

Custom server access URLs
A comma-separated list of URLs (either HTTP or HTTPS), which will be published to plex.tv for server discovery. This can be very useful in a few cases: if you’re using a VPN to get back home, if you’re using a reverse proxy in front of the media server, or if your networking configuration is otherwise unique. For instance, if you have your own custom domain with subdomain, you might add:
https://plex.mycustomdomain.com:32400

3

@hthighway - OP is talking about outbound proxy settings, not inbound reverse proxy.

4

it’s not reverse proxy he’s talking about. what feature he’s trying to request is a setting in Plex server where he could input proxy ip address and username pw (like setting up proxy in desktop to connect to), where Plex server gonna use the proxy server IP address whereever it’s deployed.

Kinda pointless to do why would you want your Plex server to connect to a proxy, but I can imagine a scenario where you can use this with Live DVR feature of plex.

Scenario: You have hdhomerun prime and raspberry pi 4 running squid proxy in US and currently youre outside state, but you have accessed to a server ( deployed from either linode, digital ocean, upcloud, etc) and turned them to a Plex server… this is where the request feature comes in. It would link the hdhomerun prime from state and outside Plex server.

I know you can do this on Linux using ip tables and link Plex server to a proxy, but it will be complex and won’t be easy for average user of Plex.

5

I have the same issues in China.

  1. Metadata does not scrap properly - blocked by China firewall.
  2. The others are not that much of a concern

While I don’t want to run playback through a proxy, I would appreciate if metadata scraping can be directed through a proxy.

System: Unraid 6.8.0
PMS: 1.18.2.2058 (Binhex-Plex docker)

Or if anyone can advise how to route the scraping, I would appreciate it.

6

Do we have any solution to this yet? I am also looking at using a proxy for metadata fetch.

7

http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables work