I’m totally perplexed by this, but I have multiple devices that use Plex, all streaming from a PC in the office that has a load of content on its hard drive. I stream from that PC to my phone, my PS5, Xbox Series, and so on.
Since the paywall I would need to pay a subscription for remote access, which doesn’t bother me as I don’t stream when i’m out of the house. But now, whilst the PS5 and Xbox still work, my phone, my tablet and even the PC itself won’t let me watch, even though I am in the house, on the same wifi as the devices that work,
In addition to this, I share the library with 2 friends and they both still have access. My friend can stream content from my computer to his house miles away. Yet I can’t watch content on the actual PC that has the files on it.
It’s as simple as it could be. A PC, with an external hard drive with all the films. Xbox and PS5 downstairs. All connected by Wifi. No VPNs or anything. But I cannot watch on the actual PC that has the films on it, although I can watch on PS5 and Xbox. Cannot watch on my phone, even though it’s on the same wifi as the consoles. And the 2 people I shared with still have access, while I get the pop up message about the £1.99 monthly fee, an d neither of them have paid.
I was experiencing the same issue. For me, the clue was in @OttoKerner’s link; specifically the point about DNS re-bind protection. I have a FritzBox router which enforces DNS re-bind protection.
From a network packet capture, I could see one of my affected macbooks make a DNS query to the plex.direct zone, which looked like 192-168-1-10.70f1ed9f556d0c54cba50ac71c31ef70.plex.direct, where the 192-168-1-10 is the ip address of my plex server (NB this is an example, my own server IP address is not given here), followed by a hex string around 32 characters long (again, I haven’t provided the real hex string here, just an example).
If I sent this query to a public DNS resolver like Google (i.e. 8.8.8.8) then I got a response with the IP address of my Plex server. However sending this to my default DNS server - i.e. my FritzBox - meant I wouldn’t get a reply…because DNS re-bind protecion is on. I assume therefore my Macbook would access the server through the Plex public plex.tv server and effectively ‘remote’ back in to my network, making the connection look like it was coming from an internet IP address and not the intrernal home network IP address of the Mac.
In the FritzBox network settings, I added the 70f1ed9f556d0c54cba50ac71c31ef70.plex.direct domain to the re-bind protection exception list. Now the FritzBox will resolve that plex.direct hostname to the IP address of the plex server, meaning my Mac can make a direct connection to it, meaning I no longer get a pop-up asking me to pay for a Remote Pass.
Apologies, there’s a fair bit of detail here which may not mean much to non-technical folks, and is quite specific to my environment. But I thought it might help some people who were experiencing this issue for similar reasons.
Only adding plex.direct should be sufficient. Because the string before that will change once you get a new certificate, which will happen after a few weeks.
Ah, thanks @OttoKerner. I did wonder about that.
Unfortunately, that’s a problem for FritzBox users, because the DNS rebind protection exceptions list doesn’t support top-level domains. I’ll have a dig into other ways around this.
Naturally, people can point their devices to different DNS servers, but that’s a slightly technical response for a lot of pepole.
