Plex & Sonos - It works but what's the best set up? Local (does it exist at all), Remote or Indirect?

[Moonfola]

Hi All,

I’ve been reading a lot about Sonos and Plex and found very useful information but I still have some doubts about the best approach to adopt for my set up at home, so hopefully this thread will help others as well.

Some information about my environment and configuration:

• Internet box from my provider connected to the WAN with Fiber and no devices connected to its LAN except for my own WiFi router (cf. below).

• WiFi router connected to the Internet box via wired connection. This WiFi router connects all devices using a different LAN than the Internet box LAN (different /24).

• Plex Server on a WD MyCloud Ex2 Ultra wired to the WiFi router with fixed IP. Plex Server Version#: 1.24.1.4931.

• Sonos connected to the Wifi router via WiFi with fixed IP. Sonos Play 5 Sonos OS 2 version 13.2.

• Port forward set on both the Internet Box and Wifi router to expose Plex port to the Internet

• Plex server remote access enabled and shows up ‘green’.

• When playing tracks from my Android devices, they show up ‘Local’ in the Plex Dashboard.

• When playing tracks from the Sonos, Plex Dashboard shows Sonos as being ‘Remote’ which essentially means that my Plex server sends data to the Internet so that my Sonos player connected to the same LAN can download it from the Internet (nonsense). On the latter, although I’ve read on various pages that the system will ‘make any attempt’ to stream media over the LAN and that Sonos will always show as ‘Remote’ because it does communicate with the Plex Cloud, I’m not convinced that this is actually happening in my case (is there a way to check withoug sniffing the LAN?).

So my questions are the following:

1- Is it true that even when streaming over the LAN, Sonos would show as ‘Remote’ in the Plex Dashboard? Would Sonos ever show as ‘Local’?

2- How would Sonos understand that it has to reach my Plex server over the LAN? Is Plex sending back to Sonos my Public IP and I need to make changes to my routing so that this Public IP is routed to my Plex server or is there any other way (I tried putting a static route, not sure it worked, still showing ‘Remote’)?

3- If the above setup results in back and forth traffic to/from the Internet between my Plex Server and my Sonos, why shouldn’t I use the Plex Relay option as an alternative as it does that anyway without the need to expose any port on the Internet from my public IP address? I realize that it has bandwidth limitation but as I’m playing only mp3 encoded at 320 kbps or less, I’m not sure it would make a difference from a quality perspective.

4- Last, I’ve read that with Plex Pass, one can control the Sonos using the Plex App. Would that modify the way Sonos accesses the Plex server or is it mereley changing the user interface with no change to the underlying process?

I realize I’m asking lot of questions but even after spending a few hours looking for answers I’m not able to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks in advance for the help.

M.

[richardap1]

I’ve been looking for the answers to these too. I have done a little testing and on my firewall I don’t see the expected amount of traffic exiting my network, so I am guessing info of the playing track is sent externally while the actual track is sent to the speakers.??

[Burning_Beard]

I’ve wondered the same thing about LAN/WAN. I don’t have an answer or fix, but will add some things that I have noticed while messing around with things.

I play songs through the Sonos app for the most part and get the same WAN listing. What I also noticed was each time the song changed the WAN IP would change as well. The IPs are all listed as AWS IPs but it changes with every track change.

One kind of work around I found is if I start a song on PlexAmp and then cast it to a Sonos speaker it will be listed as LAN connection. I can then go into the Sonos app and skip to the next song and it maintains the LAN connection listing.

I have done all the router games with port forwarding and NAT hairpin with no changes to the WAN/LAN listings.

I play around with this every couple of months hoping I can come up with something but no luck so far.

[RTMcG]

I recently invested in Sonos and wish I hadn’t. Whether I’m playing from the Sonos app or casting to Sonos from Plexamp it appears in Plex as a remote connection to the Sonos (AWS) servers in Ashburn, VA. It seems ridiculous that media on my home network has to be bounced through a server across the country.

Additionally, Sonos has a lot of problems playing my Plex music. It’ll skip tracks and say it can’t be accessed. It’ll play half a track then skip to the next. Sometimes it won’t play at all. There is quite the delay to get anything to play as it streams from my house, to Virginia then back to my house.

I don’t subscribe to any of the online streaming services because I have my own media. That’s what Plex is for. I bought Sonos because they claimed to work with Plex. It really doesn’t. The good news is I don’t think this is a Plex problem. I have none of these problems when streaming in Plexamp in my car or anywhere else–only with Sonos. I’ve done some searching online and have found some indications it’s a coding problem with Sonos and they’re working on it but there’s no timeline to a fix.

For now, enjoy your Plex but save your money on Sonos.