Today, we're going to make your Plex Media Server accessible from outside your home,
from anywhere you have an internet connection. There's a simple way to do it
and a more advanced way which involves port forwarding - and I'm going to show
you both. With remote access, you'll be able to watch your Plex media on a
boring car trip, or during a visit in town on your cell phone. This ability to
remotely access your Plex server does not require paying for Plex Pass.
If you're currently using Plex in your home, you probably have your media shared
among several devices in your home, like your Smart TVs, Roku streaming players,
your Xbox or PlayStation, tablets, phones, or other computers. But this is on your
network inside your home. What if you wanted to access your server from
outside the home? I assume most of you will have a broadband modem that you use
with your internet service provider. I assume that you have it connected to a
wired or wireless router to which you connect all your computers and other
devices that need access to each other, and out to the Internet. Now, if you have
a modem / router combination from your service provider, you have something
called a double-NAT situation where you essentially have two routers connected
in a row - which is out of the scope of this video. So I'll assume you have a simple modem.
You probably have one or more computers connected to the router,
your Plex server being one of them. You might have a couple tablets, a few
cellphones, some gaming consoles, and don't forget your Smart TVs.
Every time you connect a device to the router, it assigns a number - or an IP address - to
that device. And each time you power something off and on, you may see a
different IP address assigned to that device. This can also happen when you
disconnect one device and connect a different one. But in order to forward a
port on the router, you'll want your Plex server to have a fixed static address so
that even if you turn it off and on, it always has the same IP address.
The quickest, automatic way to enable remote access is to simply check the option to
enable it during the setup of the Plex Media Server. This assumes you have
Universal Plug and Play on your router. Think of the router as a wall that
separates the modem - which is the interface to the internet - from the Plex
Media Server on your local network. Universal Plug and Play - or UPnP -
opens a port through that wall on your behalf.
After you install the Plex Media Server on your computer, you'll want to
load it in a browser for the first time by double-clicking the Plex icon in the
taskbar. After you sign up for a Plex account and log in, you'll be presented
with some introduction screens, including an offer to upgrade to Plex Pass.
Let me exit out of that, and on the following screen, you'll be prompted to name your
server - and finally the checkbox to "Allow me to access my media outside my home."
The "easy, automatic" way to share your media is to keep this box checked.
Should you have unchecked it during setup, you can always turn it back on
after installation, which I'll demonstrate next. Let's skip the final
setup screens so we can get to the procedure. You'll want to click the setup
icon and navigate to Remote Access on the left hand side, where you'll find a
button called "Enable Remote Access." Simply click that button - and after a
while you should see a message in green that states "Fully accessible outside
your network." If you don't see it, then that means your router has UPnP disabled
by default, in which case you can log into your router and enable it, or the
router simply doesn't support UPnP, or otherwise has a faulty implementation of
it. Now let's talk about the advanced, manual way to enable remote access to
your plex media server. If you're using your computer and your router
out-of-the-box, it's most likely that your Plex server is on a machine that
has an IP address assigned to it by a DHCP server on the router. We talked
about this before: if we want to port forward, we need the Plex machine to have
a static IP address. When you look at the big picture, the entire universe of IP
addresses on a typical subnet mask is theoretically 256...
from dot 0 to dot 255. Since 0 and 255 are reserved, the theoretical maximum
number of devices that you can connect is 254, including the router. The DHCP
server on the router can automatically assign a portion of these addresses,
while you can manually assign the rest if you wish. We can even reach inside the
pool of DHCP addresses and make one of them static
by associating the IP to that one specific device - which is exactly what
we'll do later on. We can see from our previous exercise that my Plex server
uses an IP address of 192.168.1.33. I personally use a router called the
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite, so I'll show its interface in the following scenes.
Depending on the router that you use, your screens will vary. To login to the
router, I use Ubiquiti's default of 192.168.1.1 but your router may have a different
address like 192.168.0.1 or 10.0.0.1.You'll need to look up your router's documentation for its
default address. So the first thing we need to do is to assign a static IP
address to the computer on which the Plex server resides. There are a couple
ways to do that. One is to manually set the IP address on the computer itself -
one that lies outside the DHCP pool of addresses. This requires you to set up
every single device that you want static, and enter a manual IP in its network
settings. The second way is to map the unique MAC address of a device to one of
the DHCP pool of addresses - and you would do that in the router - not the device.
In my case, for the Ubiquiti router, I'll tab over to Services. For my local
area network, I can view the information about the DHCP server from the Actions
drop-down, where I'll select View Leases. This shows me that I have a pool of IP
addresses from .3 to .49, which will be automatically assigned to any device
that asks for a dynamic IP. With my router, I can change the size of this
pool manually. Depending on your router, you may or may not be able to change
this range. Returning to the first tab, there's a list of every device on my
network that's assigned an IP by the DHCP server, including my Plex PC. All I
need to do is click the Map Static Address button to link the assigned IP
to the unique MAC address of the network card in my computer - and Save. This
guarantees that my Plex server will always have an IP of .33. This feature
may be called something else on your router, like "DHCP Reservation" or "DHCP
Static Lease" but they all essentially have the same function.
Next, let's forward a port on the router. I'll tab over to Firewall / NAT, where I
can add a rule. I'll set the public port to 32400 - but you can set it to any
port between 20,000 to 50,000. I'll set the protocol to TCP, the Forward-to
address to 192.168.1.33, and the internal
Forward-to port 32400 - and this has to be 32400, which is the hard-coded
port that Plex uses. Finally, I'll type in Plex for the Description, hit the Apply button...
and we're done. Now, we need to go back to the Plex server and manually set the
public port, which I'll set to 32400. Again, you can set this to any valid port,
but this would need to match the public port that you just set on the router.
Let's hit Apply...
sometimes you may need to log out and log back in to see the correct status of
remote access, but it looks like it is displaying correctly without having to
log out. The final step is to disable Universal Plug and Play on your router,
but this step is entirely optional. You could keep your UPnP on or turn it off,
and it shouldn't affect your manual port forwarding. But I need to caution you
that if you have other devices in your home, or other programs that depend on
UPnP - like some IP cameras, smart LED bulbs, some games or applications - you may
find certain things suddenly lose remote access when you turn off UPnP. They'll
also need their own static addresses, and you'll need to forward their ports, just
like we did previously for Plex. Since we've already forwarded the port for
Plex, that connection would remain. To turn off UPnP on the Ubiquiti router,
you'll need to tab over to Config Tree, and find the UPnP Service. Now the
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite has UPnP turned off by default, so I actually
turned it on before I started this video, just for the purpose of this
demonstration. On some routers, it'll be turned on by default, and most of the
time it's just a checkbox that you need to uncheck to turn it off. In my case, I
simply click on this little minus sign and hit Preview...
and you can see UPnP is now turned off. Let's return to the Plex settings and
confirm that Remote Access is still on. After clicking Apply, it is indeed still
working without UPnP, due to the port forwarding. A quick note about Universal
Plug and Play: as we saw before, it's a very convenient feature that allows you
to "set and forget" - which relieves you of having to worry about port forwarding at
all. But with its ability to open ports through the router's firewall, there are
security concerns, especially with malware. You'll need to determine whether
the trade-off is worth it, but in general, the recommendation is to turn UPnP off.
If you encounter any problems, I highly recommend Plex's Troubleshooting
Remote Access page. It has additional details about double-NAT situations and
issues with jumbo frames. The convenience of having your Plex media available
anywhere is obvious: you can watch your movies or TV shows while you're on
vacation, or listen to your music collection while you're traveling. Here,
I'm 200 miles away from home, and while I'm connected to the hotel's wireless
internet, I can log into my Plex account on my tablet or phone to watch or listen
to all the media on my server at home.
I hope you enjoyed - Thanks for watching!