Hello, I recently purchased a PS4. I also go a plex pass so i can utilize the Plex App on the ps4.
I noticed that there is no way for me to point the app to the local plex server, so when i watch media in my home it is acutally reaching out and streaming from plex.tv. This is a waste of bandwidth and also if my internet connection were to die i would not be able to watch local media which seems silly.
Is there a way to point the plex app on ps4 to my local server? will this be avaliable in the near future?
How have you checked that this is happening? It should only happen for authentication, videos themselves should stream over your local network via a local ip. Can you get us your PMS logs so we can get a better idea what exactly is happening?
Thanks for placing the thread into correct section.
I will gather a pcap off firewall, however i had to reboot my gateway and shortly after this the media content errored out and was unable to play. I never configured the plex app to speak with the local IP, how would it know what the IP of the local plex server is?
From ps4, if i diable outbound internet access i am no longer anble start playing new media content. Also, media that is already playing prior to disabling outbound access will stop playing after a few minutes (buffer).
I am utilizing FreeNAS plex server plugin, the logs dont seem to be in the same place as other plex servers… will find and upload shortly. But i know for sure the content being played seems to totally rely on having internet access which seems odd.
Here is how it works:
The server (PMS) will talk to plex.tv and tell it its local (non-public) and the public IP and domainame (*.plex.direct) [when using encrypted connection].
The client (your PS4) logs in to plex.tv with your user credentials and gets told all the information which PMS uploaded beforehand.
It now tries to contact your server using these IP adresses. It begins with the local IP. If the server answers on the local IP, all is well.
If it cannot reach the server that way, it tries the next step: the public IP.
Normally, your router should recognize that a client on your local network is trying to speak to another device on the same local network and would therefore “reflect” this traffic so it doesn’t leave your home network.
Make sure that your Freenas server plugin doesn’t do NAT so server and client are not in different local networks.
If you enforce encrypted connections on the server, things get even more complicated. There are some things your router must do and some it must not do for this to work in a local network environment. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/206225077-How-to-Use-Secure-Server-Connections
Your first test should be to try and switch off encryption and see if something changes.
It looks like this is what is going on exactly… when the stream starts i see the connections to local server, however with out connection to internet it will not work… this is fine but would be sweet if it was possible to be in “offline” mode or something.
