Plex, Docker, and the problem of always appearing as "Remote"

Plex Media Server
,
1

Server Version: 4.69.1

Since putting plex into a docker container, I have been noticing that when I attempt to play media through the Plex application on my apple tv, it will default to transcoding down to a lower quality. I can always manually set the quality back to original quality but its clearly not ideal because the remote path is bandwidth limited.

This is what I’ve observed when connected to Plex using a web browser:

  • NAS IP ADDRESS: PORT → server shows as “nearby” and is therefore recognised as being on the internal network
  • https://app.plex.tv/desktop/ → server shows as “remote” and i’m bandwidth limited
  • synology.me address routed through synology reverse proxy pointing to plex> → server shows as “nearby” and is therefore recognised as being on the internal network

What I’ve tried:

  • added the reverse proxy url to the ADVERTISE_IP environment variable in the docker container → no change
  • added the relevant IP’s to the ALLOWED_NETWORKS environment variable in the docker container. Eg: I set mine to “192.168.0.1/24,172.17.0.0/12” to include my local network subnet and the network space that docker runs in.
  • Following the advice outlined here: Plex, Docker, and the problem of always appearing as "Remote" | Dev With Imagination → no change

Any ideas?

2

You didn’t mention setting the LAN Networks preference despite it being called out both in the document you linked and the readme in the docker repository.

What lead you to believe you should do this? Don’t! It has nothing at all to do with your issue; it disabled authentication requirements to IP addresses in this range.

3

My apologies. I must have misunderstood. What I DID do (although I didn’t list this in the above question) is set the LAN Networks in the plex server network settings (see attached image).

This doesn’t seem to have fixed my problem.

4

SOLVED

I set the network mode of the plex docker container to “host” instead of bridge. This gave the docker container the same IP address as my host (my NAS) and basically made it a “local installation”.

5

For reference, the LAN Networks pref should be comma separated, not comma and space separated. The logs indicate if there is an issue parsing this string. That was likely your issue.

This generally works better. There are several parts of the networking which are degraded in (the atrociously named) bridged networking.

6

I’m not sure if you’re in a position to change this (or if you care about it ::upside_down_face: ) but this parsing failure comes up fairly often. It seems like there could be some benefit in making the parsing for this setting (and the Allowed Networks setting) more flexible. I can only speak to the English language with any authority, but in writing there is rarely (never?) a case where a comma is followed by anything but a space. This inflexibility trips folks up commonly; and likely more often than is reported in the forums.

Could input validation be performed for the value entered, or could spaces or other delimiters be allowed?

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