Why Plex looks blurry away from home

Plex has a quiet plan B called Relay. When your server can't be reached from the internet directly, Plex bounces the stream through its own servers so playback still works. Nobody gets an error. Everybody gets 720p.

The tell-tale signs

Streams at home look perfect. Streams away from home look soft or keep buffering.
Quality tops out around 720p no matter what the viewer picks.
The Plex dashboard shows the remote stream as “Indirect”.

The fix

Relay only appears when direct remote access is broken, so the fix is to repair the direct path. Start with turning on Remote Access. If that ends in a red X, continue to port forwarding.

Eyeball spots this automatically, by the way. A watched server that slips into Relay gets flagged as limited quality on your dashboard, so you find out before movie night does.

Relay tunnels the stream through plex.services over TLS, capped at 2 Mbps per stream, transcoding down to fit. “Indirect” on the server dashboard means the session went through Relay.

Fix it once. I'll watch it from here.

I watch your Plex from the internet and send word the moment it breaks. The pay is nothing. The setup is one sign-in.

Forget the Plex token after setup

What does this mean?

Plex gives us a token so we can see where your servers are. That token is allowed to do more than look up an address. Keeping it means you trust us with it. We never see your password. Some people would rather we not keep it. This is for them.

That's fine. I still watch your servers. We never see your password. If your home internet moves, you may get an alert. Sign in once more and I pick up the new address.

🤓 Nerd details

The token is allowed to do more than look up an address. We use it to find your servers, then we delete our copy and ask Plex to deactivate the Eyeball device. Open Authorized Devices in Plex. Eyeball should be gone. If it is still listed, remove it there.

How Eyeball works