I’ll preface this by saying I have been hosting my own Plex server on my Mac for several years now. I upgraded from a 2010 Mac mini to an M1 Mac mini last year. I have had zero issues with Plex up until now. I have spectrum business internet 300mbps down and 10mbps up. My 3 kids all have Apple devices and many times we’ve all been in the house watching different things on Plex without a problem. Until today. The kids were on one iPad watching a movie and my wife and I decided to sit down and watch a movie on our Apple TV 4K. It kept freezing about 30 seconds in. I quit the app and restarted it. Same thing again. It was a 1080p movie about 2 GB in size, nothing crazy. The technical settings said that it needed to transcode because of the subtitles I was trying to pull in. And that it also didn’t have enough bandwith for direct play. Needed 2667kbps and was limited to 2000kbps. Admittedly I don’t know much about plex’s transcoding or bandwith limitations. I’ve never needed to know because I’ve never had an issue. I also share my Plex with my parents and sister. I started googling looking for a solution and read things about disabling transcoding and disabling relay and manual port forwarding. So I tried those suggestions and still had the same result. Only now the server says its unavailable outside my network. So I changed everything back to the way it was and it kept defaulting back to being inaccessible outside the network 10 seconds later. I removed 32400 from the port forwarding and save the settings. It now says that it is fully accessible outside the network but it is not. I seem to have somehow not solved my problem and made things worse. I don’t have a static IP and can’t even seem to access my routers settings but I may just cause more problems. What the heck did I do?
If everything is local, then remote access should not be triggering for home use. If it is, then your house network has changed in mysterious ways, preventing your local devices from communicating with the server.
The 2000Kbps limit for watching on your server is because your device is unable to talk to the server normally. If the normal internet-based method is not working, it falls back on the plex relay service, which is routed through Plex servers. This is a last-ditch effort to get your client and server to talk to eachother, meaning it should never come up if things are configured properly. And ESPECIALLY should not come up if you are in the same house, which points to a network configuration issue.
You mention not being able to get into your router settings? Why is that?
I’m admittedly quite lost. My parents and sister access my server remotely and it’s been working fine until I messed with things. It seems I can’t login to my spectrum router settings because I have an eero mesh system. There are some ISP settings I can edit within the eero app but without knowing what I’m doing I’d likely make things worse. Do you need to have a static IP address to use the “manually specify public port 32400” feature? Does Plex Pass give you more bandwith above the 2000kbps limit I saw last night? Thanks in advance
Please show a screenshot of the Plex Dashboard when you or someone else tries to view a movie. I want to know if the relay is even being used before we go too far down that rabbit hole.
You do not need a static IP address (externally, from your ISP) to keep remote access enabled. Your Plex server will automagically find out your house IP address and tell your clients. It’s a pretty magical process, if you know networking you’d be impressed.
You shouldn’t need a static IP address for your server (internally, from the router) for remote access either. Most routers should automagically assign the same IP address to a computer/server that they had the last time they booted. But even if it changes, the Plex server will again automagically determine their internal IP address, and tell local clients that IP for you.
You mention an Eero mesh system. Is this mesh system a new addition to your house, or did Plex work last week WITH this system? Is any device in your house wired up to the router itself, bypassing the mesh system, so you could access your Spectrum router?
So, the next thing to look at is the port. You mentioned deleting the port forward entry. Where was this, in the router you said you couldn’t access? Can you put it back in? Plex will try to use UPNP to automagically set the port forward on your router. If this fails to work (or you delete the port forward entry), you may need to re-enter this port forward again.
There is no way to bypass the 2000 Kbps speed limit when using the relay. Your video stream traffic is going through Plex’s servers for this “relay”, which is shared by the thousands of other people that use the relay. The limit is to encourage people to configure their network properly so that their servers are not required, but also to make sure that they have bandwidth to spare for people that need this relay system and don’t mind the slow cap. Plex Pass does not increase this limit past 2000 (I thought I actually heard non-pass people were restricted to 1000 Kbps).
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