I have a Plex Pass, but I’m a Plex newbie. Using Plex on my network at home has been great, but I’m trying to branch outside of that now. So far, I have over 100 titles in my library, all from movies I own. 95%+ of those titles are from blu-ray, the rest from DVD. I have all my movies in their specific directories in 2 formats - mkv and mp4.
I had real trouble just getting my Plex library to show up outside my home network, but that’s working OK now. What I’m hoping to do is share my Plex movie library with my folks back home in Florida. I’m in California. Both of our home internet networks are reasonable. I have AT&T Uverse with download speed around 30MBPs and upload around 5MBPs. My folks have Verizon Fios, so probably better than me.
My Plex Media server is a WD MyCloud EX2 Ultra.
My mother said she could see my Plex movie library, but playback was slow, choppy and unwatchable.
Is sharing my Plex media movie library all the way from California to Florida even possible? If so, are there maybe just some settings I could tweak so they could watch my movies?
Yes, you can share Plex externally - I routinely watch my Plex library when I am travelling.
In your Plex client, it usually defaults to 4mbps/720P for remote streams - since you only have 5mbit/s, I recommend you lower the speed down to 1 or 2mbit/s.
On top of that, you may want to add QoS on the Plex server to ensure your other activities do not interrupt remote streaming.
Another thing to be mindful is the amount of transcoding processing power on your Plex Server - due to the lower bandwidth of the remote stream, Plex has to transcode. I’m not sure how powerful the WD MyCloud EX2 Ultra is, but you should check to ensure it has enough CPU to transcode.
Remote streaming does work, and works very well provided you have adequate bandwidth and processing power.
The distance isn’t the issue, your 5Mbps upload will be the limiting factor. Additionally, your PMS, running on the WD device does not support transcoding (unless I am recalling it incorrectly) so unless all of your media is encoded to less than a 5Mbps bit rate your remote users will not be able to play the media.
