Hello, I need some help. I purchased a WD My Cloud PR2100 and was very excited to use as my Plex Media Server. I’m new to Plex and have a subscription to Plex Pass which enables Remote Access. Problem is, whenever I stream from another location, the quality is always very pixelated and terrible. A 1080p quality movie (1920x1080) will transcode all the way down to 720x400. No matter how great the internet connection, nothing seems to work. Everything streams fine as long as I’m in the same location as my NAS, which is to be expected. But as I go home for the holidays, I would love to access Plex from another location with no streaming issues.
I would love some assistance with this. Is there something I’m missing? Is the PR2100 a bad choice for what I’m trying to do? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
In the player, did you change the setting that forces Plex to stream lower-quality 720p videos if you are remote? It seems to be a universal setting per player to default to 720p rather than original quality, and it can be easy to forget to change that.
Thank you so much for responding! I really hope you can help with this issue.
I made sure to configure my server for debug level logs. I DO NOT have verbose logs enabled.
I streamed the movie “Fury” on my iphone over cellular network and it’s showing that it’s streaming locally but that’s not possible. Also, shows a yellow exclamation mark.
@Divideby0 thank you for your input. I checked on my appleTV because that’s normally whenever I stream from home. And the setting was on maximum for remote streaming.
Oops, I see a tiny yellow (!) in the upper corner. Point at it. Does it say that it is using the relay? If so, then you might not have the server correctly configured for remote access. Oh, and now I see the red (!) in the lower left, next to Remote Access. Meaning you have a config issue.
The Plex relay is a last-ditch effort to get a remote user to connect to your server if the network settings are not properly configured. Since your server has punched an outward hole in your network (most networks allow outbound, but block incoming) to the master PLEX company servers for… reasons… your server can piggy-back on that connection to also do video. But it goes through the company’s site, which costs them bandwidth. So they restrict connections using the relay to 2 mbps or less.
I pointed at the yellow (!) and it says “indirect”. It doesn’t say relay. But is that the same thing as what you’re describing. It certainly would explain it. How do I fix this?
Note: I’ve never had any problems with Remote Access until I switched internet service providers. I now have ATT Fiber. And it’s really been a headache trying to get remote access working properly since.
Oh, indirect is the term it says, not relay? Well, it’s the same thing.
Plex by default will try to do UPNP, which is a protocol in which a device or computer inside your network can automatically request a port on the router to be forwarded to themselves without you needing to do it. If your internet provider changed, your router/modem is different and may not support UPNP (it’s considered to be dangerous to leave enabled anyway). You may need to do port forwarding yourself of port 32400 to the IP address of your Plex server. This is all done in the management interface of your router/modem.
Port forwarding is needed in order to allow outside access to a device inside your house. By default, routers block all traffic ORIGINATING from the outside of your house. This works great for 99% of home user’s cases. But if you ever run something that may at any time get a request from outside - for example if I was your friend I could suddenly ask to watch media on your server - you need to specifically allow that request (and the destination within the house) by “forwarding” a port. The port used by Plex is 32400.
Wow! Thank you so much! I called att and requested that they create port forwarding that plex uses at 32400 and it works wonderfully! Thank you so very much friend! You’ve made my christmas travels a great one!
