Plex

Discuss the world of file sharing, from philosophy to help with applications.

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nesman
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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.
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battye
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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.
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.

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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nesman
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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.
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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.
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nesman
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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.
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Rat
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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?
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nesman
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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.
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nesman wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2024 5:07 pm I normally don't watch any of the content that they host. The ads are excessive.
Thank goodness for that. I thought there was something wrong with me (again).
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