Problem Viewing Some Movies on Plex Externally

Synology
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1

I have a Synology 1521+ with 2 5-bay Expansion Bays running DSM 7.2.1 Update 5. Volume 1 is my Plex library and 26TB of the 45TB is filled. They are all use Plex naming structure and thus have a ton of folders.

All of my Plex media plays from storage, and also plays from Plex apps locally. I don’t have any 4K media. Almost all my media is .mp3, .mp4, or ,mkvs. I have a fast internet connection and very few people on at any one time.

I can add a few new movies. I have the movies ideally set for iphone, ipad and such viewing. When I watch the movies from my Synology NAS, they play fine. When I open my Plex app on my iphone the same movie plays fine. If I turn off the WIFI and make my phone play the same movie from the outside it just cycles and does nothing. It seems that most of the movies play fine. The problem creeps in when I have added new content. The new content should not even need to be transcoded.

I have done extensive research on this. I keep my Plex version up to date, I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling, falling back to old versions, I have stopped and started the Plex server, I have verified that the permissions are correct, I have removed and re-added libraries and yet I still have this problem.

I did find a miraculous fix one time that seemed to instantly fix everything, but it is not working anymore. I suspect that in one of my plex updates, it overwrote the fix. Now, I can’t find the fix online anywhere.

I believe it had to do with Synology needed to allocate RAM buffers to the folders that it is constantly monitoring for new movie/tv updates… but I can’t remember what the commands were.

Does anyone have any constructive help for this problem or know what the commands were?

Thanks.

3

I was trying to write as a concise synopsis of my problem as possible, which already took too much to write out.

I am not saying you are wrong, but…

I am in IT and I don’t see how it is a Firewall issue when the entire Plex works for everyone except a few files. Everyone on the outside can get to & regularly play 80% of my videos. If it were a firewall isssue it would most likely work or not work… not partially.

It is not a WIFI issue, as it happens to everyone not internal to my network… most of whom are not on any WIFI.

It is not external LAN issues, because the same problem is experienced by people in Chicago, Vegas, Southern CA, and other diverse locations and times & times of the month.

It is not ISP upstream issues, because at the same time the problem is presenting itself, other larger files play just fine.

I still say it is not a transcoding issue. I turned off transcoding, and several of the files are small TV episode files.

I am not an expert, but if the “video” is playing through the app, transcoding or not it should play through the app from outside.

I came here hoping for some new ideas or someone that knows about the caching problem. I specifically pointed out all the research I have already done to try to avoid wasting mu time with the exact same info you are repeating.

I have tried all that and it doesn’t make a difference. I have also tried clearing out all my cache, deleting my entire install and reinstalling.

I have even deleted the easyaudioencoder as one site recommended, because it autoupdates, no help.

If your “tips” were actually designed to help, they were extraordinarily vague.

I have an extra-ordinarily large library and I suspect the problem is not common because few people have libraries the size of mine on Synology’s.

Sorry this is long or bashes your advise, but I am very frustrated when I have checked all these things and every post spews the same info without considering there could be something else wrong.

4

I did find a fellow Plex/Synology user elsewhere. He didn’t know precisely what I was referring to either, but he did offer some great advice.

I still have to digest some of this myself and make no promises as it is just one guys advice, I do say though, my setup started small and grew and grew. I am now finding that I may have to revamp my design to maximize things. I am just passing this on here for others, if you are interested.

Firstly, shut off music folder monitoring, there are too many folders and this is precisely what you are trying to control.

He also separated LUNs by rating so that no one LUN would reach the 62TB hard limit. He further recommends to use Synology’s iSCSI mode and on the Synology storage look at setting the stripe size to small, as it will decrease latency on the disk array.

His Plex itself runs on an SSD stripe set with SAS high write disks and the data is on a Windows 2022 VM file server.

Other things tips concerning larger libraries is to set the scan for new content to like 4 times a day and partial scan when changes are detected, just not for music. Also, for library cleanup, there is a setting to not immediately remove items, use this or music and stuff gets removed from playlists each time it is lost and rediscovered. (huge headache for a long time).

He says that he had increased the number of folders that can be monitored and it has poor results as the machine doing the folder monitoring tends to peg the CPU. That has been set back to defaults.

As far as the cache setting in Plex, that was left at the default 40MB as it can slow down the interface if increased too much…

For transcoding settings use low and slow for best quality. Try not to use the auto setting on clients it is goofy. He recommends using maximum all the time unless there are internet problems at the client side and then set it lower. The default of 60 sec for transcode before throttle is sufficient.

When looking into 4k, if you want to allow users to stream the newer type files the transcoder is only x264 it can do some x265 but offloads the HDR Tone Mapping to the CPU as well as audio decoding. This can also cause issues with playback if any transcoding or audio stream conversion is happening.