Plex Remote Client Not Playing

[Herrk]

Using the TrueNAS Plex plug-in and it randomly stopped working when you're not on the LAN. You can see all the movies/shows but trying to play them will result in a forever loading wheel, and I never get an error. When the Plex server is down I can't access the movies/shows (as expected). In the dashboard I can see the remote user playing the video. Everything on the LAN is working perfectly.

VMWare ESXI 6.7U3
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G / 32GB 3200 / 24GB SSD for OS and 8TB HDD for NAS
VM: 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM (reserved)
TrueNAS-12.0-U6.1

Plex Jail is in DMZ, remote access is enabled on 32400, confirmed by the Plex admin portal.
Set a static IP to the jail (DHCP isn't working on the jail for some reason, for TrueNAS itself DHCP is working fine).

Any clue where I should look? Restarted network, VM/jail and the server itself.

Thanks!

 

[Herrk]

Oh, network adapter is Intel Gigabit CT 1000 and the HBA is an LSI 2008. Forgot to add that, but I have a feeling it's a weird network issue...

 

[sretalla]

You'll need to look into your transcode and player settings.

It can absolutely be the case that you're set to play direct on the LAN, so transcoding isn't invoked, but in many cases, the remote client can decide it wants the content transcoded, so if your server isn't set up to do that well, it will fail.

 

[Herrk]

You'll need to look into your transcode and player settings.

It can absolutely be the case that you're set to play direct on the LAN, so transcoding isn't invoked, but in many cases, the remote client can decide it wants the content transcoded, so if your server isn't set up to do that well, it will fail.

It was working before, I didn't change anything and it started failing outside my LAN environment. I attached the transcoder settings, they're basically default on everything. And on the player itself: I'm just testing by using my mobile phone and then turning WiFi off and on. I don't think I can be more granular on any of the other settings for transcoding on the player, can I?

 

[Herrk]

It was working before, I didn't change anything and it started failing outside my LAN environment. I attached the transcoder settings, they're basically default on everything. And on the player itself: I'm just testing by using my mobile phone and then turning WiFi off and on. I don't think I can be more granular on any of the other settings for transcoding on the player, can I?

Disabling Direct Play stops the videos working on both, haha. So it seems like you said it's related to transcoding. While the server is set to transcoding, I do see it in the dashboard (H.264, transcoding) and CPU stays at max 80.06-81.54%, both when set to "make my CPU hurt" or "Prefer higher speed encoding".

Is there anything else I can/need to set? Any logs that I can share that might help?

 

[sretalla]

You have hardware encoding enabled... do you have the hardware and correct setup for that? (there's a thread in the forum for enabling plex hardware transcoding).

You also haven't specified the temp directory location for the transcode to happen in... ideally that will be a fast disk location that's mounted inside your jail, somewhere like /mnt/tmp