Lately I have noticed that when my vpn connection is connected, I am unable to get metadata from imdb and thetvdb.

If I disconnect my vpn the data flows perfectly.

Has anyone else experienced this and/or has discovered a work-around?

Thank you

I think I figured this out.

In my vpn settings I had enabled "Prevent WebRTC leaks". When I disabled this setting, the apparent 'block' disappeared and everything began to work.

It begs the question, however, that if this protection must be disabled to access the site, is the site detecting your actual IP address and not the vpn?

This would circumvent the purpose of vpn would it not?

This sounds like a question better suited for www.superuser.com -- I'm not sure anyone here can help you with that one.

You should try to keep this enabled if possible. You are correct that it is a valid security concern. Check out https://webrtchacks.com/webrtc-notify/ for more info. But do you really need to run these services through your VPN every time? I personally say, if your paying for VPN bandwidth, then no. Other services being controlled by MCM should be ran through VPN definitely. But a database lookup for publicly available metadata? That's like looking at the card catalog in the library. You probably cant prevent MCM from accessing the websites in question without using the webrtc in their api's. I assume these sites want your true IP for a few uses. To prevent abuse and overuse of api calls to access the DB metadata and data only file transfers from a content delivery service. A CDN probably hosts most of their images and video.

I'm a Systems Administrator and Network Engineer who works for an ISP by trade.