this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Plex

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In an email to customers who run Plex servers at the large German hosting company Hetzner, Plex said that access will be blocked next month. It’s not clear if Hetzner is the only hosting company this applies to, but several customers confirmed that they received the same email.

Has anyone here on Lemmy got this notice? Self-hosting is still in the green, but with this precedent who knows what Plex could do later.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Dump Plex, they already a lot less free than should be tolerated by self hosters.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, Jellyfin is really great. I’m sure there are things that Plex does better, but Jellyfin does everything I’ve asked it to.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Intro skipping? Offline playback? I'd love to ditch Plex, but I use these features regularly.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

My favourite Jellyfin feature is the one where it doesn't 'accidentally' reset my dashboard every few weeks to promote its garbage free streaming partners. I don't think I could give that feature up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes you can use a plug-in for intro skipping, and can download for offline playback.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And opposed to current plex not just the person paying premium can directly download from the web ui, but everyone who has permissions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Individual episodes without transcoding however.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’d like intro skipping. But none of these features are enough for me to switch from jellyfin. Luckily, sending the files to vlc is easy enough for offline playback.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There's always this plugin. Its a little annoying to get the skip button working but you can just set it to make a chapter marker so you can skip with that. Though be warned it will hog resources until its done scanning everything on the first run

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When Jellyfin has Plexamp, I might consider it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp

I'm not sure how they compare as I am not a music person, but there are a few apps that function as a Jellyfin music player.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I actually had to look it up because it sounded like Winamp, but it didn't kick llama's ass. Is that what they kept peddling along with Tidal sub?

Honest question, do you not have Prime or Apple music sub or stuff you listen to is so unique, neither of those have it?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By far the best music player I have ever used. My music library is 24K tracks, so I have no need of any music service and use plexamp exclusively.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That sounds like a massive enough collection to never get bored with, but don't you want new music at least on occasion? Do you just buy individual songs or albums and add to your collection? Do costs add up? I imagine redundant storage with at least some sort of backup for collection that large isn't cheap.

Just trying to compare it to streaming service I get as part of my $120/year Prime membership.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I probably average a couple of albums a month (I only buy albums unless something is not available as part of an album). My storage is a Synology 920+ with 36Tb it's just over half full. I hear new music all the time. (But have you listened to new music?). I'm going to see Greta Van Fleet on Friday (I guess that might be considered new'ish) if there's an opening act, and they're any good, I'll buy some of their music.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sure put I paid for it more then a decade ago. And Jellyfin still has some bugs that are annoying.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

In recent years, copyright holders have repeatedly requested Plex to take more action against piracy.

Their preferred method of logging into your own home server by going through their website should really give you pause when reading about how anti-piracy organizations pressure them.

Anonymous Data

In addition to the information described above, Plex collects anonymised data when users interact with our services. This includes:

  • Server / library data
  • DVR device information: manufacturer name and model

There have been numerous stories over the years about how anonymized data isn't really anonymous.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Surely Plex can come up with a way to accurately identify those that are actually running dodgy paid servers against the TOS and leave the smaller guys alone.

I know the whole idea of the shared library is already pushing laws to the limit but those that are running large scale paid servers will eventaully ruin it for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It's always the case of a small group ruining the whole thing for everyone. Identifying and removing big dodgy paid servers would be a good middle ground without punishing the others.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Let's be honest, what Plex offers was too good to be true, and too good to last

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wasn’t it Plex that led to LastPass getting breached?

I mean, why isn’t everyone using open source at this point? Companies are just clamming to suck up as much money as possible from people still stupid enough not to learn from what every other company has done! 🤦‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Lifetime passes vs monthly subs. FOSS equivalent product don't exist considering live TV guide, default SSL security, integration with settop media boxes, etc that Plex offers... jellyfin is close but far from the decades of polish and half baked features Plex have added

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It was a very old, unpatched Plex server running on hardware that had access to LastPass critical data.

If you ran very old FOSS with unpatched vulnerabilities, you'd have the same problem. It wasn't Plex that did it, it was unmaintained self-hosting.

Plex has it's problems, but this wasn't one of them.