I’m just curious. I’ve got my server running on my media centre PC (device A) and my media stored on my NAS (device B). If I use the player on a third device ©, does the media data have to travel from B to A before being sent to C, or is C directed to pull the data directly from B? Does it make a difference if the playback uses transcoding?
I’m just wondering what effect playback has on my (already rather slow) LAN speeds.
The traffic goes through the PMS server.
Clients talk to the server via TCP/32400 (at least my Android phone does).
Your server talks to your NAS via SMB, NFS, etc file sharing protocol.
It would get messy very quickly if Plex had to add SMB, NFS, etc protocols to every client.
The Plex team can weigh in with details (and let me know if I’m off base), but PMS probably has limited knowledge whether the data is stored on a local drive or a NAS. PMS talks to the OS and says, for example, “I need to read the file at D:\plex media\movies…” The OS then provides the file. PMS doesn’t know if D: is a local SATA drive, a USB drive, a mapped network drive, etc. (substitute mounts points for drive letters if you’re using Linux).
I’m using \NAS\ rather than drive mappings, but I doubt that makes a difference. Thanks for confirming what I already suspected.
