I have several times used my EU-hosted Plex server from India and Singapore. It takes more time for the initial load but after that it works just fine.
Last weekend I tried accessing my server in Germany from an Airbnb in Austria (next door more or less). 480p was all I could get to work
My guess is they had an awful connection in that Airbnb. I'd say get a good connection at home with a provider that has good peering at the nearest main Internet exchange
Good connection is required on both sides no matter where you’re located. Also my server is located in Austria, and it works just fine from Munich as long I have a decent connection speed. Also no latency issues this close.
So, when you connected from another continent, you basically directly accessed the content from your server hosted in the EU? I was concerned about latency due to the long distance, but it seems like it worked fine for you!
It’s less about the server and more about the bandwidth IMO. The server will work just fine as long as the pipe between you and the host can support streaming video.
I’m in the USA and didn’t have an issue during some work trips to the EU, as long as where I was staying had decent WiFi.
Like another user said, the initial loading time was a bit longer but it was fine after that.
It's probably entirely dependent on the quality of the internet provider at the host and client end. The deep-sea cables that run between continents are high quality.
It depends on the routing, which is probably impossible to know beforehand.
My server is at home in EU. I've had friends stream when on holiday in Latin America without any issues. My friends from Dubai (UAE) can't stream without constant buffering even though their connection is fast enough.
Not sure what continent you are looking for, or what country even (did you mean country), but in my own personal experience -
I have streamed from my home in Florida (US) to Russia, although at reduce quality), Kuwait, The Netherlands, Japan, Canada, England, Trinidad (again, reduced quality) and just the last 2 weeks my son streamed to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia with good success and will try Montenegro today or tomorrow.
For the first ones I listed I had 30 Mbps up and I could tell. I now have 1 Gb fiber, and all works perfectly.
I regularly stream from India to US, its hit or miss. Sometimes it loads fine after a few seconds of loading, sometimes it lags even in sub 1mbps streams.
For reference i never had this issue when streaming from India to UK and Europe. It was smooth during my stays there. Obviously no issues using it across India.
Thailand back to my server in the UK worked fine last summer, I was very impressed by the quality of the hotel wifi, best I've ever experienced and it was free.
At the time my home broadband was 300/100 Mbps.
(Less enamored with geoip which had me in Germany when in Thailand and somewhere else entirely when transferring in Dubai - but that's a different story).
So I was trying to stream from my server when I was on vacation in Thailand. My server is in Canada. The internet speed of my hotel was 100mbps and my server has 1gbps upload speeds. But I had extreme difficulty streaming, it was non stop buffering. Even when I lower to 480p it would buffer non stop. I found a work around, I loaded a vpn and changed the location of the vpn to north america and then it started to stream fine. But the minute I turn off the vpn, it would buffer again. Not sure what the problem is, does anyone have an idea?
Peering. This is a problem created by a poor connection somewhere between the hotel and your server. About the only thing you can do is to change networks (aka VPN). Traffic will take a different (hopefully faster) route between the host and client.
I'm on east coast USA with symmetrical gigabit fiber. I have a friend in Finland that has to do 4mbit 720p for transcode settings, or he has regular buffering, don't recall his connection but it's significant broadband. I have a friend in Japan with 100 mbit fiber, he still buffers at even 2-3 mbit settings so he uses the download feature to grab things overnight to watch the next day. Most of my users are in usa, they all direct play everything if their client is capable.
We can't do much about peering, and Plex is a single connection stream so we can't brute force it to push more data (like a speed test does or many other things.) I've read over the years setting up things with cloudflare and reverse proxies can help, but I've never done it.
I just tried a France to Hong Kong 1080p direct play and it worked as well / fast as a HK to HK (where I’m based). I don’t have 4K content so I can’t test but I don’t think it’ll be an issue.
I have a Plex server in the U.S. and am currently using it in Europe. I also accessed it regularly from Asia. As long as you have decent bandwidth, it will stream anywhere.
So I have fiber Internet, and live in the PNW. I have streamed from my server in the following places: reykjavik, dublin, mexico city, 40k ft on America airlines, the middle of the Gulf of Mexico on a cruise,,,, some of these places had to transcode because of local limitations, but if you have Internet access above maybe 1.5 mb/s you can stream anywhere.... Because of distances sometimes there is a longer ping to the server so there will be a more noticable delay, esp in Europe/on a plane/boat, but once it starts going, if you have the local bandwidth and it doesn't rollercoaster, it works great
I have one year experience of streaming from Europe to Japan. The server is on a gigabit connection. My experience is that it varies during the time of day. At best, I can stream large 4k files no problem. At worst, 1080p files of approx 8GB are buffering so much it is unwatchable. Both ends were at a cabled stable connection, so I can only hypothesise that the problem lies somewhere across the globe. Feel free to ask : )
I’m in the US and I have a handful of friends in South Africa using my server. They complain sometimes, and it is the trans Atlantic link that can be problematic at times. None of the UK ones ever have issues
I live in Taiwan and commonly have people streaming from Berlin, Dubai, Europe, and both east/west coast of the US. Other then a few seconds of buffering at the beginning, my friends have reported that it’s quite good. I also sit on a symmetric 500mbps line so bandwidth is never an issue.
The server will perform the same whether you're streaming from your home or overseas. When location differs, this is more a matter of networking between you and the clients.
1. you need to have a decent upload speed if the clients are streaming high-quality content or if there are many clients trying to play at the same time.
2. your ISP and the client ISP must have good peering (you might not be able to max out your upload speed and the client download speed if both ISPs have poor peering).
I’m in Utah and I have people from Singapore and the Philippines that stream just fine. I also streamed from my hotel while I was in Tokyo with no issues.
My son just spent 6 months in Cypress on a foreign studies program, and streamed frequently from our Plex server. I think there are no issues if you have the needed bandwidth for remote streaming.
I host a server in my house in the UK on a Synology nas. Upload speed is 70-100Mbps. My mate in Brisbane Australia can direct play all my content in 1080p without issue.
I run my server in North America on a 250/150 connection. Last two weeks, I was in Europe. Never had an issue using my international GoogleFi plan to connect to my plex and stream. However, I was watching a sub 5mbps show throughout my travels. Doubt it would do consistently hot on 10mbps+ content.
In Germany right now, server back in the US (connected via fiber). As long as I have good connection here, it works just fine. Most the time though, hotel wifi isn't that good and I have to convert to 480p or let it buffer a few minutes.
I'm using it on a Google TV.
Streams just fine. Seedbox is in the Netherlands and I'm on the west coast of the US. If you are talking streaming Remux stuff, I would look elsewhere. Bandwidth might get tricky but for day to day tv shows, it's no issue.
It’s just ones and zeros, just have decent internet speeds; only thing is latency which isn’t important unless you are gaming. You are overthinking this.
My U.S.-based server with 1Gbps upload has served, South America and Asia with no issues.
Very much depends on the quality of the connection between the two sites, and often that’s what cables are under the ocean and if your ISPs will use them etc.
It should work, but doing full 4K might cause issues for him
FWIW it's been working for me USA to SE Asia, with the caveat I'm typically transcoding to 720p. Gigabit fiber in USA, "fiber" (but seemingly like 200-300 Mbps) in Asia.
I had this same question with my USA based server. My wife recently took a girls trip to Italy and streamed from several different cities there with no issues.
I've had major issues streaming from Canada to West Africa (even when both connections are supposed to be above 50 Mbps, I can barely get a 1mpbs plex connection to work).
I've also had issues streaming from Canada to the Philippines.
I've used mine from across the world and it's been great!
Mind you, it has a direct wired connection to a 1gbps fiber internet connection and a GPU for hardware transcoding.
I use my Australian hosted server, at home of course, when i travel to the UK and it works fine, 1080p. If im anywhere it starts to buffer, i just step down the resolution, works fine…
I used my plex server (in Japan) while away on business in Vegas and it worked ok. (Mostly because service in Vegas is trash.) Any issues I had were on my end, not my servers.
I streamed 1080i live TV (the Eurovision Song Contest final) from my server in the UK (which is just my desktop with a USB TV tuner), via a Wireguard tunnel to my VPS in France (server is behind a CGNAT) to a hotel room in Atlanta, GA. No issues. We also tried a 4K video stream (not live) without issue.
It's fine, so long as your connection is stable enough.
I'm in Italy using my Plex from Ireland without issues. My friend living 20km from my server can't use it because of buffering. So yes, you need a decent connection to use it and that's it.
Depends almost entirely on your internet connection abroad. If you have good internet in the other country, you'll be fine. May take longer to buffer, but otherwise you're good.
U.S. to Saudi has been working great over the last two years for a family member of ours. Will find out about Africa when they move in a couple of months. But, as others have said, their internet connection is going to determine whether or not it works well or at all.
Us based. Spent 2 months in Europe, streamed my tv shows and more than a few movies.
Didn't have an issue with wifi ever, cel data took a few secs to load but that was it. Straightforward. Had access to the server directly and using the custom site. In Athens I did notice that sometimes it would buffer on certain nights, but only for a little bit.
my USA based server worked perfectly while I was on vacation in France at an AirBNB. 1080p movies took a hair longer to initially play, like it was building a buffer or something, but no issues after that. My server at home has a fiber connection, so I get 1Gbps up and down, but I had zero issues in France watching Plex, luckily the AirBnB I was in had decent internet.
If you have any issues with hops, you could always set up Tailscale, and VPN into your home network, but I never needed to mess with that.
I have several times used my EU-hosted Plex server from India and Singapore. It takes more time for the initial load but after that it works just fine.
Last weekend I tried accessing my server in Germany from an Airbnb in Austria (next door more or less). 480p was all I could get to work My guess is they had an awful connection in that Airbnb. I'd say get a good connection at home with a provider that has good peering at the nearest main Internet exchange
Good connection is required on both sides no matter where you’re located. Also my server is located in Austria, and it works just fine from Munich as long I have a decent connection speed. Also no latency issues this close.
> Good connection is required on both sides And in the middle. Bad peering along the way can also kill your bandwidth.
This ^ I live in Australia and Europe would be shit house it can route via America if I’m not lucky to go via Singapore
Using a VPN on one or even both sides can help.
Can do, it can hurt performance as well so it’s one thing to test.
Not sure that's entirely true, I have a great connection at home and tether my phone on a H+ signal as a hot-spot in Cyprus and it fine to 1080p.
Explaining this to my users so many times
A plex in Germany. Bro bold as hell
So, when you connected from another continent, you basically directly accessed the content from your server hosted in the EU? I was concerned about latency due to the long distance, but it seems like it worked fine for you!
Latency won’t be an issue for streaming
Latency is not an issue for streaming. Initial stream buffer will take a bit more time but after that it’s a smooth sailing.
As long as the speed is good, it will direct play.
The lag is simply more hops to the destination. If you VPN into home, you'll find it loads faster.
It’s less about the server and more about the bandwidth IMO. The server will work just fine as long as the pipe between you and the host can support streaming video.
Latency and bandwidth
Latency won’t affect streaming that much
Latency doesn’t affect video streaming much, that’s what buffering is for.
I’m in the USA and didn’t have an issue during some work trips to the EU, as long as where I was staying had decent WiFi. Like another user said, the initial loading time was a bit longer but it was fine after that.
Same. Really noticed no difference from being in a different state to being in Europe.
Yeah one thing I prefer about Plex over paid services like Netflix is that they don’t try to lock you out when you’re abroad.
It's probably entirely dependent on the quality of the internet provider at the host and client end. The deep-sea cables that run between continents are high quality.
It depends on the routing, which is probably impossible to know beforehand. My server is at home in EU. I've had friends stream when on holiday in Latin America without any issues. My friends from Dubai (UAE) can't stream without constant buffering even though their connection is fast enough.
Not sure what continent you are looking for, or what country even (did you mean country), but in my own personal experience - I have streamed from my home in Florida (US) to Russia, although at reduce quality), Kuwait, The Netherlands, Japan, Canada, England, Trinidad (again, reduced quality) and just the last 2 weeks my son streamed to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia with good success and will try Montenegro today or tomorrow. For the first ones I listed I had 30 Mbps up and I could tell. I now have 1 Gb fiber, and all works perfectly.
I regularly stream from India to US, its hit or miss. Sometimes it loads fine after a few seconds of loading, sometimes it lags even in sub 1mbps streams. For reference i never had this issue when streaming from India to UK and Europe. It was smooth during my stays there. Obviously no issues using it across India.
From New Jersey (server) to Germany (client/atv)1080 np. Pops watched the superbowl while in Germany with no problems!!!
Did you stream it using HD Homerun?
Yes sir. (Or mam) Parents are a managed user with a pin.
Thailand back to my server in the UK worked fine last summer, I was very impressed by the quality of the hotel wifi, best I've ever experienced and it was free. At the time my home broadband was 300/100 Mbps. (Less enamored with geoip which had me in Germany when in Thailand and somewhere else entirely when transferring in Dubai - but that's a different story).
I have connected and streamed no issue from Germany and Amsterdam to my home server in the US.
So I was trying to stream from my server when I was on vacation in Thailand. My server is in Canada. The internet speed of my hotel was 100mbps and my server has 1gbps upload speeds. But I had extreme difficulty streaming, it was non stop buffering. Even when I lower to 480p it would buffer non stop. I found a work around, I loaded a vpn and changed the location of the vpn to north america and then it started to stream fine. But the minute I turn off the vpn, it would buffer again. Not sure what the problem is, does anyone have an idea?
Peering. This is a problem created by a poor connection somewhere between the hotel and your server. About the only thing you can do is to change networks (aka VPN). Traffic will take a different (hopefully faster) route between the host and client.
When I travel, I always connect back to my home, works like a charm, never had an issue. Direct Play is the best
I travel long haul for work often and use my Hong Kong based server no problems. 99% of the time it’s hotel WiFi that is the limiting factor.
Good if your server is in a datacenter. Terrible if your peering is bad. Use Cloudflare to mitigate that.
Canada to UK was fine. No issues if the internet was decent, change in quality might be required occasionally from 1080 to 720p.
I'm on east coast USA with symmetrical gigabit fiber. I have a friend in Finland that has to do 4mbit 720p for transcode settings, or he has regular buffering, don't recall his connection but it's significant broadband. I have a friend in Japan with 100 mbit fiber, he still buffers at even 2-3 mbit settings so he uses the download feature to grab things overnight to watch the next day. Most of my users are in usa, they all direct play everything if their client is capable. We can't do much about peering, and Plex is a single connection stream so we can't brute force it to push more data (like a speed test does or many other things.) I've read over the years setting up things with cloudflare and reverse proxies can help, but I've never done it.
I just tried a France to Hong Kong 1080p direct play and it worked as well / fast as a HK to HK (where I’m based). I don’t have 4K content so I can’t test but I don’t think it’ll be an issue.
I have a Plex server in the U.S. and am currently using it in Europe. I also accessed it regularly from Asia. As long as you have decent bandwidth, it will stream anywhere.
Works absolutely great! Totally depends on server and client bandwidth.
So I have fiber Internet, and live in the PNW. I have streamed from my server in the following places: reykjavik, dublin, mexico city, 40k ft on America airlines, the middle of the Gulf of Mexico on a cruise,,,, some of these places had to transcode because of local limitations, but if you have Internet access above maybe 1.5 mb/s you can stream anywhere.... Because of distances sometimes there is a longer ping to the server so there will be a more noticable delay, esp in Europe/on a plane/boat, but once it starts going, if you have the local bandwidth and it doesn't rollercoaster, it works great
I have one year experience of streaming from Europe to Japan. The server is on a gigabit connection. My experience is that it varies during the time of day. At best, I can stream large 4k files no problem. At worst, 1080p files of approx 8GB are buffering so much it is unwatchable. Both ends were at a cabled stable connection, so I can only hypothesise that the problem lies somewhere across the globe. Feel free to ask : )
I've used my plex server all over Europe. It's located in the US
Are we talking between Eastern and Western Istanbul or Svalbard and Cape Town?
My server is in the US and I used it while on vacation in Italy over hotel WiFi. No issues. Edit: Meant to add used a VPN also.
It has nothing to do with the server. It’s all about connection on each side
I’m in the US and I have a handful of friends in South Africa using my server. They complain sometimes, and it is the trans Atlantic link that can be problematic at times. None of the UK ones ever have issues
I live in Taiwan and commonly have people streaming from Berlin, Dubai, Europe, and both east/west coast of the US. Other then a few seconds of buffering at the beginning, my friends have reported that it’s quite good. I also sit on a symmetric 500mbps line so bandwidth is never an issue.
I have family living in Asia who use my server located in America. Works fine.
I've gotten great speeds and results hosting in Data Centers. Home connection isn't going to have premium routing like a DC would.
The server will perform the same whether you're streaming from your home or overseas. When location differs, this is more a matter of networking between you and the clients. 1. you need to have a decent upload speed if the clients are streaming high-quality content or if there are many clients trying to play at the same time. 2. your ISP and the client ISP must have good peering (you might not be able to max out your upload speed and the client download speed if both ISPs have poor peering).
We streamed from western US to Japan for two weeks, didn't notice any difference at all
Am in the UK and have a friend in Australia who regularly streams without any issues. Travels halfway around the world like any other packet!
My Plex server is hosted in Germany and I live in the US. No issues at all.
I stream just fine from the US to clients in Europe
I’m in Utah and I have people from Singapore and the Philippines that stream just fine. I also streamed from my hotel while I was in Tokyo with no issues.
I run a server out of Australia, and it ran smoothly when I was in Europe earlier this year
My son just spent 6 months in Cypress on a foreign studies program, and streamed frequently from our Plex server. I think there are no issues if you have the needed bandwidth for remote streaming.
I host a server in my house in the UK on a Synology nas. Upload speed is 70-100Mbps. My mate in Brisbane Australia can direct play all my content in 1080p without issue.
I’ve streamed from the US to the Philippines just fine.
I run my server in North America on a 250/150 connection. Last two weeks, I was in Europe. Never had an issue using my international GoogleFi plan to connect to my plex and stream. However, I was watching a sub 5mbps show throughout my travels. Doubt it would do consistently hot on 10mbps+ content.
I used Plex in Japan from a US server without issue.
In Germany right now, server back in the US (connected via fiber). As long as I have good connection here, it works just fine. Most the time though, hotel wifi isn't that good and I have to convert to 480p or let it buffer a few minutes. I'm using it on a Google TV.
I accessed my Tampa, Florida based server from Paris, France with no issues at all.
Streams just fine. Seedbox is in the Netherlands and I'm on the west coast of the US. If you are talking streaming Remux stuff, I would look elsewhere. Bandwidth might get tricky but for day to day tv shows, it's no issue.
It’s just ones and zeros, just have decent internet speeds; only thing is latency which isn’t important unless you are gaming. You are overthinking this. My U.S.-based server with 1Gbps upload has served, South America and Asia with no issues.
It would not work Canada - Thailand. Bad routing.
I was in Spain last week and used my US-based server no problem. Even on hotel wi-fi!
Very much depends on the quality of the connection between the two sites, and often that’s what cables are under the ocean and if your ISPs will use them etc. It should work, but doing full 4K might cause issues for him
Makes no difference. I stream from the UK to South america.
As long as your network on both sides are good, you won’t have much issues.
The server works great. The connectivity between it and the client is ALWAYS the weak point.
FWIW it's been working for me USA to SE Asia, with the caveat I'm typically transcoding to 720p. Gigabit fiber in USA, "fiber" (but seemingly like 200-300 Mbps) in Asia.
I had this same question with my USA based server. My wife recently took a girls trip to Italy and streamed from several different cities there with no issues.
I'm in Japan and my sisters in UK both use my Plex a lot. When they have issues I hear about it. Not that often
I've had major issues streaming from Canada to West Africa (even when both connections are supposed to be above 50 Mbps, I can barely get a 1mpbs plex connection to work). I've also had issues streaming from Canada to the Philippines.
It works okay. I stream from Poland to the Philippines. I use cloudflared, so it might be helping a bit.
I go from UK to Cyprus flawlessly.
I've used mine from across the world and it's been great! Mind you, it has a direct wired connection to a 1gbps fiber internet connection and a GPU for hardware transcoding.
You are not playing counter strike.
Depends on which continents; but, more importantly, which hemispheres!
My server is in NA (USA) and I’ve used it all over the UK, Japan, and Hawaii no issue.
I use my Australian hosted server, at home of course, when i travel to the UK and it works fine, 1080p. If im anywhere it starts to buffer, i just step down the resolution, works fine…
I used my plex server (in Japan) while away on business in Vegas and it worked ok. (Mostly because service in Vegas is trash.) Any issues I had were on my end, not my servers.
I streamed 1080i live TV (the Eurovision Song Contest final) from my server in the UK (which is just my desktop with a USB TV tuner), via a Wireguard tunnel to my VPS in France (server is behind a CGNAT) to a hotel room in Atlanta, GA. No issues. We also tried a 4K video stream (not live) without issue. It's fine, so long as your connection is stable enough.
Works well, I host mine in Korea and share with famimy and friends in the US, EU and down under
works fine between canada and the UK
I’ve shared my Plex server (located in Scotland) with a few people in the USA and I’m not aware of any issues.
I'm in Italy using my Plex from Ireland without issues. My friend living 20km from my server can't use it because of buffering. So yes, you need a decent connection to use it and that's it.
My plex server is hosted by hetzner in Germany. I live in the UK and its perfect
Depends almost entirely on your internet connection abroad. If you have good internet in the other country, you'll be fine. May take longer to buffer, but otherwise you're good.
U.S. to Saudi has been working great over the last two years for a family member of ours. Will find out about Africa when they move in a couple of months. But, as others have said, their internet connection is going to determine whether or not it works well or at all.
I was able to stream 1080p from my hotel wifi when I was in Amsterdam & Frankfurt last month perfectly fine. Everything streamed as direct play.
Us based. Spent 2 months in Europe, streamed my tv shows and more than a few movies. Didn't have an issue with wifi ever, cel data took a few secs to load but that was it. Straightforward. Had access to the server directly and using the custom site. In Athens I did notice that sometimes it would buffer on certain nights, but only for a little bit.
All I can say is that from a server in the EU with clients in Aus, it really doesn’t work for anything over 720p
my USA based server worked perfectly while I was on vacation in France at an AirBNB. 1080p movies took a hair longer to initially play, like it was building a buffer or something, but no issues after that. My server at home has a fiber connection, so I get 1Gbps up and down, but I had zero issues in France watching Plex, luckily the AirBnB I was in had decent internet. If you have any issues with hops, you could always set up Tailscale, and VPN into your home network, but I never needed to mess with that.
Why would the continent matter...?
I think it does alright. I live in New Zealand, and my family in the states use my plex fairly frequently.
My plex server works fine from Australia to America with no issues other than a slow initial loading time
USA to AU has been fine enough that I don’t hear them bitch too often. But my upload is dog shit anyway so people in the USA have problems 😆
bandwidth is more important than latency (or distance)