For years, I’ve had my Plex setup behind my ASUS router. Recently, I decided to try out some firewalls and settled on Untangle. Something I noticed when testing OPNsense and Untangle… random clients had direct connection problems and the Plex relay service kicked in and indirect connections were made to my server and clients were throttled to 2Mbps. I don’t think it was a firewall issue since I could see the same problem in Tautulli logs going back for months and months and months.
In Untangle, Config>Network>Port Forward rules… 32400 inbound is routed to my Plex server’s IP. Is that the only rule I need? Just trying to figure out why a small number of people have relay problems and get stuck at 2Mbps. (Again, I’m not blaming Untangle, just want to make sure that’s the only rule I need for smooth Plex operations. Like right now, 3 people are streaming and a 4th one is stuck at 2Mbps. I had him stop the stream and restart it and he came back as direct play so the relay issue is random and has been going on even when I was using just my ASUS router.)
Side note… since my server is always up and available, should I just disable Plex relay all together? Since the overwhelming majority of folks can direct stream from me, I’d rather just kill the relay feature and deal with these relay one-off problems as they pop up.
My friend that was stuck at 2Mbps is out in Phoenix. IP is 71.209.246.83 and he was watching ‘The Good, the Bad and the ugly’. AROUND 3:04pm is when I noticed it and he stopped and restarted around 3:37pm and his quality was back to normal.
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.444 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode/Req#27c68] It took 10.000000 ms to retrieve 214 items.
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.447 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode/Req#27c68] Calculated media file path for path [metadata://themes/tv.plex.agents.series_a1e8bd8b52fde35176a910a2c050800c362bd67a]: ["/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/TV Shows/e/1677214e7d52151afb9e6826842c29159f623c3.bundle/Contents/_combined/themes/tv.plex.agents.series_a1e8bd8b52fde35176a910a2c050800c362bd67a"]
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] Streaming Resource: Terminating session 0x7f9fe4e441d8:250bc4d4f4ab26c932fb1f65d33535aa which is using 1623kbps of WAN bandwidth. Used is now 66196kbps
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] Streaming Resource: Terminated session 0x7f9fe4e441d8:250bc4d4f4ab26c932fb1f65d33535aa with reason Client stopped playback.
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] Streaming Resource: Removing session 0x7f9fe4e441d8:250bc4d4f4ab26c932fb1f65d33535aa
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] Streaming Resource: Attempting to create AdHoc transcode session 250bc4d4f4ab26c932fb1f65d33535aa
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] MDE: Selected protocol http; container: mp3
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] MDE: analyzing media item 384905
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] MDE: tv.plex.agents: Direct Play is disabled
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.454 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] MDE: tv.plex.agents: Audio Direct Streaming is disabled, so video's audio stream will be transcoded
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.455 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] MDE: Cannot direct stream audio stream due to profile or setting limitations
Feb 06, 2023 14:56:02.455 [0x7f9fdc598b38] DEBUG - [Req#27c58/Transcode] MDE: tv.plex.agents: selected media 0 / 384905
They appear to have missed “opening up” the player settings.
(All players are shipped with minimal bandwidth usage settings to guarantee playback – even if pretty crappy)
They’ll want to allow “Direct Play”. “DirectStream” and whatever maximum bitrate you allow (if you have one set)
Also, it looks like they can only accept MP3 audio. Check that too please.
