I’ve been using Plex for 2 years and I never got any problems using it.
But since a couple of months (wihtout changing anything on my box or on plex media server) my remote access went unavailable outside my network.
I couldn’t play movies higher than 320p so i stopped using Plex for months.
Recently, I decided to try to use it to check if it was working and nothing has changed.
Even after I uninstalled Plex, deleted environment variables …
So I decided to buy the plex pass to test it out, and it came out that it was working well. But only sometimes …
As you can see in my dashboard, when it works well everything is fine, I can stream my movies normally. But sometimes for some reasons my bandwith is null and i cannot stream movies higher than 720p.
Plex Pass membership isn’t involved in your remote access configuration – this will work (or not) both with and without a Plex Pass.
There’s an extensive troubleshooting guide on remote access which is addressing some of the potential breaking points.
My personal recommendations are:
Try to switch your router / Plex remote access configuration from automatic to a manual port forward… automatic configurations might work but have been reported to fail occasionally depending on the router’s handling of UPnP.
There’s a site called https://portforward.com/ which has guides on how to establish a manual port forward for many routers
Make sure the host of your Plex Media Server has a static local IP address inside your network (this is usually available in the router configuration as IP reservation).
Verify if your ISP is assigning your router an actual public IPv4 address – some ISPs organize their backbone like a home network (CGNAT) in which case your router’s public IP will be a private IP address. Plex cannot usually establish a full remote access in such a setup.
Verify the router’s public IP is actually fully accessible on the specified public port from outside your home network (you can do this using a service like canyouseeme.org)
if the router isn’t accessible, this implies the issue is between “the internet”, your ISP and your router (including the router configuration)
if the router is visible but remote access is still giving you issues, this implies the issue is between your router (incl. the router configuration) and your Plex Media Server
While streaming a file from a remote location, open the server’s dashboard to confirm the stream is listed as remote instead of indirect on the Now Playing tile. Indirect connections are routed over a Plex Relay server because the client and server cannot establish a direct connection – those indirect connections have a limited bandwidth (this is actually the only area where you should experience a difference as Plex Pass members have a bandwidth threshold of 2 Mbps while regular users are limited to 1 Mbps). Indirect connections usually imply some misconfiguration of the remote access configuration.
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