Remote access not working with mpv player on iOS

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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Player Version: 7.10

For a while now I thought that remote access streaming was broken in the iOS Plex app. Everything works fine on Android devices though (including remote access).

Today, while going through the settings, in the iOS app, I noticed the Advanced > Use Old Video Player toggle. So I tried it out, and all of a sudden voilà, I was able to stream to my iOS device remotely (on cellular as well as other WiFi networks).

The downside though is that most of my new videos are encoded using HEVC, which AVPlayer (i.e. “Old Video Player”) doesn’t support, forcing my Plex server to transcode the movie. With mpv (i.e. the new player) I can stream the same movies without the server transcoding, however it breaks remote access.

Is anyone else able to stream remotely, using an iOS device and the mpv player instead of AVPlayer?

Update: It appears that the transcoding is only running a Copy operation, so the strain on my server is rather negligible. But having said that, if the Plex team decides to discontinue support for AVPlayer we’ll be back where I started.

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How was it broken - what were the symptoms?

The “Old Video Player” has suddenly learned some new tricks - it works with the new iOS features like picture-in-picture and spatial audio. But it has other disadvantages, too.

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It simply refused to stream any video when accessing Plex remotely (on the same LAN it work seamlessly). I would just get the spinning wheel indefinitely. Once I switched to the old player it started working (i.e. streaming remotely) immediately. I understand the merits of moving to mpv as the new player, I just wish I could get it to work for remote streaming, and understand why the old player works while the new one does not.

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