I am looking into putting a VPN system on my Plex Server, but don’t want it to interfere with playing back videos in my house. I run Plex on Fire Sticks but I don’t know how they connect to my server.
Does the Fire Stick connect directly to my Plex server over my internal network? Or does it go through Plex somehow and then come back into my house since it has to authenticate?
If I install something like NordVPN, will that allow internal network traffic to travel normally or would it make all traffic go out the VPN and come back in?
Hopefully I’m just overthinking this, and it’s no big deal, but just wanted to make sure.
As long as everything is on the same local network, it runs locally, but once you add a VPN, it can affect the local stream. You might need a VPN client that allows local LAN traffic when running. Accessing it remotely when running a VPN is an issue.
You probably need to look into split tunneling, so that Plex is still able to communicate on your local network.
As a general rule I’d say the laymen should avoid trying to run Plex behind a VPN at all, because you do need a bit of networking knowledge to understand how things work and not break what’s already functioning.
I have Mullvad. It has a setting for local network sharing. That should be on. It also has a split tunnel for the Plex Media Server app to allow remote access.
Those were all I needed to get Plex working properly with the VPN running.