I learned recently that I don't have a public ip address, so using Plex remotely is tricky. I'm natted. My ISP ran out of ipv4 addresses and isn't doing ipv6 yet.
I'm going to try to find a tech at my ISP to sweet talk, because the sales guy wants me to pay $10 extra per month to get an ip address. I don't need a whole static ip to myself. I could manage with either a dynamic ip or even just a handful of ports forwarded.
Plex
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I had that exact same issue with CG-NAT, fortunately my ISP was able to take me off that without paying for the static IP address. When I called I didn't explicitly say I was having a problem with Plex (although it probably wouldn't have mattered if I did), because plenty of other services (like even Xbox I think) don't perform so well with CG-NAT so they must get the question all the time. It's probably easier for them to just freely help the 20% of users it will impact seeing 80% of casual internet users will never notice the difference.nesman wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 9:52 pm I learned recently that I don't have a public ip address, so using Plex remotely is tricky. I'm natted. My ISP ran out of ipv4 addresses and isn't doing ipv6 yet.
I'm going to try to find a tech at my ISP to sweet talk, because the sales guy wants me to pay $10 extra per month to get an ip address. I don't need a whole static ip to myself. I could manage with either a dynamic ip or even just a handful of ports forwarded.
If your ISP still won't take you off CG-NAT, there is another Plex option in-built which might work for you. By default there's a Plex Relay option which routes your video through their server and on to the remote device. It's limited to 1mpbs if you have a free account (which I used while I had the CG-NAT problem, and it's watchable but probably only about 480p quality), although I read somewhere if you have a Plex Pass then the relay is 2mpbs.
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My ISP is a phone co-op for a rural town with a ton of farmers. I'd be surprised if one out of one hundred knew what an ip address is.
I'm hoping to convince them that I just need roughly 1/6,500th of an ip address, and I'll gladly pay that portion monthly. (Rounded down to the nearest penny, of course) Just a range of 10 ports forwarded, and I'll be golden. They can even rotate my public ip daily and I'll be ok.
I just keep laughing at the fact that I haven't run into this in 2 decades of having internet service. I even had a helpdesk job once where my desktop had a public ip address for a few years. It didn't need one, but there were so many to go around that it didn't matter.
I'm hoping to convince them that I just need roughly 1/6,500th of an ip address, and I'll gladly pay that portion monthly. (Rounded down to the nearest penny, of course) Just a range of 10 ports forwarded, and I'll be golden. They can even rotate my public ip daily and I'll be ok.
I just keep laughing at the fact that I haven't run into this in 2 decades of having internet service. I even had a helpdesk job once where my desktop had a public ip address for a few years. It didn't need one, but there were so many to go around that it didn't matter.
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Layzie Bone
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Boy am I late replying to this...
I had to fight my ISP to get my public IP back when they changed the equipment.
I have been using plex for about 4-5 years and I run it on a PC with a graphics card. I personally think if you go with a graphics card route, might try AMD cards because nVidia locks you to two concurrent transcodes unless you buy a quadro or some professional card that costs way the ***** more.
Converting h265 into something else is very intensive but boy does it save disk space if you have a lot of stuff. So depending on how large your library is, or how big you want it to be, you might consider better hardware especially if you want to share with family and friends.
There are a few issues I have with plex but I haven't found anything that really comes close. Not sure if plex changed their price, but I only pay $5 for plex pass and for me, that's so I can do the hardware transcoding.
I had to fight my ISP to get my public IP back when they changed the equipment.
I have been using plex for about 4-5 years and I run it on a PC with a graphics card. I personally think if you go with a graphics card route, might try AMD cards because nVidia locks you to two concurrent transcodes unless you buy a quadro or some professional card that costs way the ***** more.
Converting h265 into something else is very intensive but boy does it save disk space if you have a lot of stuff. So depending on how large your library is, or how big you want it to be, you might consider better hardware especially if you want to share with family and friends.
There are a few issues I have with plex but I haven't found anything that really comes close. Not sure if plex changed their price, but I only pay $5 for plex pass and for me, that's so I can do the hardware transcoding.
I caught it on sale a few months ago and got the lifetime Plex Pass. Still don't have a static ip. If Netflix starts to hassle my brother for account sharing, I might downgrade my account with them and spend the extra on getting that ip.
Owing to the fact that most things become available here about 5000 years after the fact, I only recently started playing with Plex and, honestly, I'm not impressed. Maybe we have different service here but, as far as I can tell, it is populated with very old, low quality TV and films that nobody wanted to watch in the first place. The picture is poor, the sound is poor, the stream is unstable and the ads are really annoying. If the product was good, I could maybe tolerate the ads. It's really irksome that the best quality appears during the billions of ad breaks. It makes no sense. Clearly they can deliver from a technical point of view, but they don't.
I dunno.... Maybe I'm missing something important?
I dunno.... Maybe I'm missing something important?
I normally don't watch any of the content that they host. The ads are excessive.
Where it shines is if you have a media library saved up from years of digital hoarding. Movies and TV that are stored on my PC are easy to watch on my TV or phone. You can share access to your library to a friend and let them stream from your server. The quality is decent, even when my ISP has me firewalled and I have to use Plex's relay server. My brother can text me in the morning to request a movie, and typically he can watch it that evening.
Where it shines is if you have a media library saved up from years of digital hoarding. Movies and TV that are stored on my PC are easy to watch on my TV or phone. You can share access to your library to a friend and let them stream from your server. The quality is decent, even when my ISP has me firewalled and I have to use Plex's relay server. My brother can text me in the morning to request a movie, and typically he can watch it that evening.
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Layzie Bone
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Ah I should have responded to this long ago. Yes yes I use plex. I do run it on a PC so I can a little more performance on the transcoding. I do share with family and a couple friends. The 4k stuff, I feel like my old Skylake is getting aged out, just haven't had the money to do a new build but 4k transcoding usually is fine but some titles not so much, but direct plays I can't say I have actually tapped out the server on direct plays, but transcoding 4k stuff for me is iffy, 1080p all day long though.
One thing that has been an issue is ***** peering. I have 1 Gbps fiber and although speed is never an issue on the "regular" internet, peer to peer speeds are seldom anything near 1 Gbps, maybe 100-200 mpbs for most people, but I have had some issues where peering was so bad that 2 mbps was all one person could get. Basically it's all the routers between you and your viewer having heavy traffic, basically you need a CDN and yeah, not going there for plex.
I used to have all the metadata on a spinner drive but I figured that was a death note for the drive and have moved that to it's own SSD drive, that actually had a good impact on how fast plex runs on other devices, particularly thumbnail generation. I had thought about other ideas to boost performance, mainly with IO, like a RAM drive, if anyone does that anymore.
One thing that has been an issue is ***** peering. I have 1 Gbps fiber and although speed is never an issue on the "regular" internet, peer to peer speeds are seldom anything near 1 Gbps, maybe 100-200 mpbs for most people, but I have had some issues where peering was so bad that 2 mbps was all one person could get. Basically it's all the routers between you and your viewer having heavy traffic, basically you need a CDN and yeah, not going there for plex.
I used to have all the metadata on a spinner drive but I figured that was a death note for the drive and have moved that to it's own SSD drive, that actually had a good impact on how fast plex runs on other devices, particularly thumbnail generation. I had thought about other ideas to boost performance, mainly with IO, like a RAM drive, if anyone does that anymore.
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Layzie Bone
- Mr. Computergeek Salad Guy
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And apparently I was looking at the first page....
So yeah Plex started getting into the space of streaming "free" to watch TV and Movies and yep, your typical crap stuff. I mean not to say you can't find something good, I also don't use that stuff. Essentialy Plex is really meant for people who have (presumably) large media libraries of music, TV shows and movies (that were obtained legally) and be able to both stream to devices like a roku, fire TV, whatever and also be able to share with other people....Kind of like having your own personal netflix...but you're Netflix. I'm guessing everyone is like REALLY? IS THAT WHAT PLEX IS FOR? MY MIND IS BLOWN lol
Not sure how well it would work but Nes you might be able to use a VPN that will allow you to do port forwarding through their service, you would be able to use the VPN's public facing address to get around being NAT'd by your ISP. Could be an option, also probably a pain in the ass to live with too. And now we have commericals in Netflix and seems like they don't add a lot of new titles that I want to watch either.
So yeah Plex started getting into the space of streaming "free" to watch TV and Movies and yep, your typical crap stuff. I mean not to say you can't find something good, I also don't use that stuff. Essentialy Plex is really meant for people who have (presumably) large media libraries of music, TV shows and movies (that were obtained legally) and be able to both stream to devices like a roku, fire TV, whatever and also be able to share with other people....Kind of like having your own personal netflix...but you're Netflix. I'm guessing everyone is like REALLY? IS THAT WHAT PLEX IS FOR? MY MIND IS BLOWN lol
Not sure how well it would work but Nes you might be able to use a VPN that will allow you to do port forwarding through their service, you would be able to use the VPN's public facing address to get around being NAT'd by your ISP. Could be an option, also probably a pain in the ass to live with too. And now we have commericals in Netflix and seems like they don't add a lot of new titles that I want to watch either.