It seems all my smart home services hosted from my NAS box (ie UniFi, HomeAssistant) all seem to be accessible remotely with the exception of Plex. I have been told this is due to me Internet provider using CGNAT. There appear to workarounds for this like NGROK and VPN but it would be great if we could use a native supported solution from Plex.
Thx
Relay has limited bandwidth even for Plex Pass users.
I too have the problem with CGNAT and Plex specifically. I have a CCTV system, Tapo plugs, Amazon plugs, house-wide temperature monitoring etc and they all work perfectly fine with my Swish Fibre connection, which returns a CGNAT address when you ask what your public IP address is.
Everything I have that is accessed remotely, works fine with this limitation from the ISP.
Plex is the only thing that doesn’t work through the CGNAT. I tried some solutions but in the end I opted to pay £3 a month for a fixed IP and now Plex works fine remotely.
I don’t know how the other devices manage to talk into the house from afar with a CGNAT IP address from the house, but they do and it would be useful if Plex did that too, saving me £3 a month which is solely needed for Plex remote access.
Those devices are making outbound connections to establish comms. They do not require port forwarding, so CGNAT is not an issue. As others have stated, the Plex relay service can perform similar functionality, albeit at a much lower quality than your media most likely is. This often causes transcoding on your server as well. You may be able to use other services like you mentioned to achieve the functionality you are after. But CGNAT will be an issue for inbound connections.
There is a giant difference between a video streaming solution and some home automation.
The latter cause almost negligible data traffic and therefore doesn’t cost an arm and a leg in data volume fees. So it is easy to provide a relay for those services.
