Appears to be Hetzner for now, wouldn’t be surprised if all VPS get affected eventually.
I never understood this, it’s your selfhosted server but you kind of don’t own it and depend on them, so you just have an application which depends on a their service which means plex isn’t 100% selfhostable, correct?
Plex has been hostile towards self-hosting since the very beginning. They have been asked to add local authentication for more than 10 years.
Yup, as soon as they started the mandatory login bullshit, I bounced. Companies keep adding this “feature” as a way to control your stuff: Doom on Switch, Halo Master Chief edition, nvidia, my fucking mouse(!?); all need a login for no other reason than to add a point of failure/killswitch.
Same here. When my Internet is out, my household needs to still be able to watch shows from my NAS locally without having to jump through hoops. Plex wouldn’t let me just do that anymore.
Moving to Emby has had its own small issues, but with the internet out the family can still just load the TV app and watch a show like normal. They don’t need to know how to do any troubleshooting, alternate login options, etc.
The problem is that they want to route control through their own servers for making sure you can’t use some of the extra features without paying.
A few years back they dropped some clients (including the one for my old TV) because they were dropping support for legacy SSL ciphers on their servers - and those devices didn’t have support for the new ciphers. This is a pretty stupid dependency due to the way they want to do things - so I moved to jellyfin back then, and have been encouraging people to drop plex ever since.
To be fair, old ssl isn’t really ssl at all & considered to be a vulnerability by a lot of libraries.
Without them forcing you to go through their server for user authentication it’d be a thing local to your network - where it wouldn’t really matter. Without that stupid requirement you also could just keep unsupported clients running by yourself.
But can’t you already. Just allow unencrypted clients?
But also on the other side, we’re talking about just media consumption, not banking or other sensitive data
Yeah, I agree, and ultimately shame on the tv manufacturer. However many software just won’t connect so it’s not really a plex issue. If they use a library that won’t support it…
A few years back they dropped some clients (including the one for my old TV) because they were dropping support for legacy SSL ciphers on their servers
TLS 1.0/1.1? Those were deprecated and dropped by the IETF with RFC 8996. You can’t even get a certificate using 1.0/1.1 anymore unless you are self-signing.
You can also allow unauthenticated users on certain networks, usually limited to your local nets. But I do agree that doesn’t solve the problem. I’d love to allow users to optionally use local authentication with, eg, Authelia, something built in, or an LDAP backend.
as always for profit orgs are proven to be abusive on their customers… so happy that I’m using Jellyfin
lol “Selfhosted” my ass - that’s why FOSS is superior regardless of features.
Exactly, open source is always worth the extra effort, if any, to get things working. Contribute!
Not really. I bought Plex for $100 13 years ago.
Do you know how much time that saved vs fucking around with xbmc trying to get plugin to work and the media scanner to be consistent?
It was worth every penny and saved me hundreds of hours fucking around with libraries to scan in anime because it doesn’t follow the proper s01e01 format.
Yes really. You know how much I paid, initially, for Jellyfin, et al, and had them working in an afternoon?
Oh, and was that software available in 2013? No? Right, you are just throwing shit against the wall because someone pointed out that Plex was the best software we had, for a reasonable price, for 10 years or so.
You’re the one who mentioned 2013. My point in the original comment was about now. It wasn’t mentioned explicitly but I meant it
always worth the extra effort
Here I am thinking always means past, present, and future. What a fucking idiot I am 🤦♂️.
Jellyfin wasn’t even around when I bought Plex. I don’t even think emby was and if it was it was nowhere near as good. So yes Plex has served me well over the years. I am worried about it’s future so have jellyfin all set up in parallel but it still has some show stopper bugs for me to totally migrate over.
You are so eager to be on The Right Team you didn’t even read the comment before replying
My dude if it’s taking hundreds of hours to get Kodi set up for you that’s a you problem. I’ve paid 0$ for Kodi XBMC or jellyfin over the past forever.
Lolol you clearly have no idea how bad xbmc was 13 years ago.
Yeah no. I’ve been installing Kodi since it was XBMC and you needed to break out 007 Nightfire to softmod the original Xbox. Working XBMC /Kodi has been easy from the start. It’s practically unchanged UX since those early days.
The two people who replied to you are the same person hahaha. Sad.
👌👍🤣
Xbmc plugins were garbage and the media scanner was garbage. You people are just forgetting how bad xbmc was, especially if you had it set up with something like sabnbdz which regularly would screw up wherever regex matching they were doing.
[X] doubt
This ^
If i could get HW accelleration to work with Jellyfin, like it does in Plex, I would switch yesterday.
Works fine for me via VAAPI on Linux using /dev/dri/renderD128. What OS are you using?
Hmm appears that I got it working by trying again. It was something about adding group to my docker compose file that did the trick. Thank you for motivation. 4K HDR is working now!
Next issue, Swiftfin for Apple TV needs quite a bit of polish, for instance I can’t change the subtitles within the player. But perhaps I should pay for Infuse until I feel it’s there.
I’d be quite satisfactory to not support Plex anymore.
It was something about adding group to my docker compose file that did the trick.
Ah yes, I do remember something about certain distros limiting access to /dev/dri/renderD128, so maybe adding the group gave the docker process the necessary permissions? I am not sure, just making guesses right now. Super glad you got it working though!
Next issue, Swiftfin for Apple TV needs quite a bit of polish
Yeah, this is definitely one of the areas Jellyfin needs to catch up on. Their app support is a bit buggy, if not entirely unavailable on certain SmartTV platforms. Definitely an adjustment. I use the Jellyfin chromecast app, and its also buggy with subtitles. Every time I seek, the subtitles get duplicated. I am sure this will all get ironed out over time.
It was definitely linked to Debian, which was something I missed first time around. And not something that needed doing for my Plex instance.
I’ve tried Infuse now and I am very happy with it. It appears very polished, even compared to Plex.
Works fine for me! (DS920+)
The fact that this comment - offering nothing - got the upvotes, while the three comments trying troubleshoot are not tells me everything I need to know about this community
It’s probably just because they posted earlier and some people haven’t seen the newer comments. The other comments are now starting to get upvotes. I wouldn’t place too much emphasis on the voting as a means of measuring a community’s worth anyways.
What’s the problem? I gave it GPU access and it just worked. Given Jellyfin is a fork, it shouldn’t be too different
Works better for me, I do av1 which I don’t remember plex even supporting
This is the last straw. I already was very shakey with all the restrictions that were piling up, but this is just one thing too much. Cancelling my subscription and installing jellyfin.
Yep same here, I’ve been curious about trying Jellyfin for a long time now so this just gives me all the more reason
I’ve switched few years ago and didn’t look back .
I installed Jellyfin on my server but the Android TV app is just so awful.
It honestly feels like a webpage from 2005 with all the blocky elements, terrible scrolling, and no way to sort.
If you want to go to, say, Workaholics, you have to scroll through your entire library until you get there. There’s no option to go straight to W. And, don’t worry, the scrolling is very slow the whole time!
The search seems to work maybe 10% of the time. I’ve typed in the name of a movie and it wouldn’t find it, but it did find episodes of shows that kinda match. I’ve typed in names of TV shows and it’s found nothing. Both times, the movies and shows existed in my library.
If they can make it look and work better, I’d be happy to switch to it fully. All I’d need then is a way to pull the XMLTV file from Plex so I can record, too.
The Plex app for the Shield has a lot of bugs itself, though. I connected my Shield to a smart plug because it froze the system often enough that I needed to automate a way to restart it. Unfortunately I’d rather put up with that than the Jellyfin UI.
Hmm never had a problem with Jellyfin on the shield pro or cigar one. On the cigar one Netflix always stops showing video and just the loading screen.
I’m curious, just checked out their site.
I’m a little alarmed at needing to modify SSL and port forward and all that shit. My experiences haven’t been great with port forwarding in the past.
In short jelly fin doesn’t seem as easy as you are all making it out to be.
That’s only if you want to watch it outside your home network, and either way I would recommend not just opening a port to the world like that. I’d say to use Tailscale (which is trivially easy to install) for remote viewing.
I will check into this Trailscale. Thanks!
In short jelly fin doesn’t seem as easy as you are all making it out to be.
It does definitely require a bit more work, especially because Plex does things like authentication and network access for you, but that’s exactly why all of this drama got kicked up in the first place. Plex doesn’t want to get into legal troubles, however unlikely that may be, for providing access to whatever content people are hosting. It isn’t true self-hosting.
True self-hosting requires work and a small amount of technical knowledge, but IMHO it’s worth it for the freedom, privacy, and control.
Yes you’re totally correct, I’ll have to do some more reading.
You have to port forward for Plex as well.
No I believe upnp took care of that in some form, Plex sets it up.
Jellyfin also supports UPnP, but you really shouldn’t be exposing the raw ports to the public anyways.
Ideally, you’d setup Jellyfin and a reverse proxy like SWAG that handles the SSL stuff for you.
Thanks, I just realized what community I was in lol. Stumbled in here from the everything tab, so now I understand the technical stuff!
I’ll stick around here a while you’ll have me!
That’s still port forwarding. It’s just automated.
A well-configured network that follows security best practices should always have UPnP disabled.
Well, not sure if I have that then.
Jellyfin ftw
Am not even surprised, Plex went to the gutter long ago when someone gave them the brilliant idea to start a media company on software used by pirates.
switched to Jellyfin, took about 10 minutes to have it up and running. Cya Plex
AFAICT for self hosted only Plex works with smart TVs.
Jellyfin has apps for Firestick, Roku, Android TV etc - they’re listed on their website. There are also some third-party ones.
Was curious before about setting it up on a Samsung TV, apparently can sideload an app or something? Didn’t look too far into it because Plex ‘just worked’. Will have to revisit that.
Google TV.
Your “smart” tv never needs to touch the internet. They’re usually going some sort of spying anyways.
They’re usually going some sort of spying anyways.
You say that as if the Google TV systems don’t do that…
And if your smart tv has some kind of browser, that works too
There’s definitely more Plex apps but I’d suggest just getting a third party streamer if your TV doesn’t have a Jellyfin app (which suggests it’s probably quite out of date and probably not the best option).
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Why is anyone still using plex?
After the last time they fucked over their userbase, jellyfin was created, an open source system that is awesome.
Dump plex, come to jellyfin, we got cookies.
I don’t want your cookies. I want privacy.
We got, uh, muffins?
That’s illegal
The Jellyfin experience on iOS and Apple TV is not as good as Plex. Hopefully someday that will change.
Probably because those are just as proprietary as plex
Jellyfin was forked when emby went closed source, I don’t think it had anything much to do with any specific event at plex
It’s been a while now but I remember it happened when Plex forked over their users
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web NAS Network-Attached Storage PIA Private Internet Access brand of VPN Plex Brand of media server package SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
[Thread #138 for this sub, first seen 15th Sep 2023, 05:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Im very curious about what was the actual violation
It’s about the server access sellers, but to block a whole major VPS instead of accounts that commit the violation is kinda absurd.
It looks like another step towards further restricting what users can do with their servers, local or virtual.
Yeah I got sick of feeling like it wasn’t my plex server even though I have plex lifetime pass. Have stopped using it in favour of jellyfin
I tried out Plex when I was first setting up my media server and having to do a bunch of stuff through Plex servers was one of the main reasons I jumped ship immediately. The hardware is in my house, the files are in my house, I never want it to leave my house, I kept thinking why the hell do I need to mess around with Plex accounts and online connections??
HEY WANNA WATCH LIVE TV?
No thanks I have my offline files
LIVE TV LET’S GOOOOO
There’s nothing good to watch these days. I’ll just stick with the collection of old TV shows I’ve got stashed on my server.
I stopped using it for about 5 years because there was this truly cursed period where it wouldn’t remember manual connections if you weren’t logged in and wouldn’t work without an active internet connection if you were logged in. Even after they fixed both of those there was still a 50/50 shot it would treat logged-in local devices as remote devices and stream out via your internet connection and then back in to the client device. In fact I still don’t log my devices in if I don’t have to.
You know it’s kind of funny and damn near every piece of surprise him software is getting into controversies like this but you’ve never heard of a free and open source software ever having these problems
No they just have the problem of someone wanting to ad something and then forking it. And then that fork getting unmaintained. Or the main project loosing steam and dropping off also. Seems to be happing to jellyfin, they are stuck at just good enough.
So these are people that sell access to (presumably media-filled) existing Plex installations?
That does seem like a problematic thing to do and I understand why Plex wants to shut that down.
But surely their tons of online-integrations and user-account-requirements gives them other tools at their disposal than outright blocking a major VPS provider, that seems insane.
If the vast majority of people on they host were selling access it makes sense. Users don’t want to hear it but Plex has to shield themselves from lawsuits. If you willfully let people break the law with your product as a feature you have no argument in court. Same goes for why they add all these features they core users don’t want. They need a reason to argue that they don’t just make money on piracy. FOSS doesn’t usually get sued though, but nothing is preventing it. Everyone needs to be careful and if your going to illegally download movies don’t be greedy and sell access to it.
That’s a big if. Hetzner isn’t some tiny piracy haven. it’s a well known and very popular German hosting company.
Even if it’s popular with those resellers, it’s certainly also popular with others.
And Plex has ways to identify the problematic hosts. why don’t they just shut those down?
I’m just speculating, but maybe the vast majority of people running on VPS are doing these things. Idk if it’s even allowed in their terms of service.
So they should block only those accounts, not everyone.
Easy to see, no? A filter like "VPS+tons of users+tons of media+tons of concurrent visits from all over the world "
More reasons I’m glad we switched to Jellyfin
Sever access sellers are kinda shitty and not what Plex should be about. IMO.
I’m not saying this action is good.
I mean, you’re paying for PaaS (Piracy as a Service).
Forget their reasoning, the fact that they can block access at all should be reason enough for anyone to abandon them. Glad I abandoned my lifetime membership years ago.
Why is every company committing suicide by user hate?
Is there something in the corporate water?
Starting in ~2010 there was an absolute gold rush of investment in the tech sector - if you had a moderately good idea, knew how to put a proposal together and could get it in front of the right people, you could get $10-50 million without having to worry about little things like “how are we going to turn a profit” and “how will will we keep paying the expensive developers and infrastructure costs when the investment money runs out”.
This has changed in the last few years - the money is drying up, and the investors that are left and much more worried about their investments actually having a business model and a path to profitability rather than just throwing money at people and hoping that Google buys them for 50x the original investment.
No special insider knowledge, but I’d bet this is what is happening - Plex probably isn’t in a spot where they can sustain the current staffing and infrastructure costs purely out of existing revenue. They will be reliant on ongoing investment to let them keep developing rather than just keeping the lights on, and that investment will come with more conditions than it would have had 5 years ago - they will need to hit targets for number of accounts, percentage of paid accounts etc or they won’t be getting further investment, which for a tech product is effectively a slow death sentence
I had to move to cloud cause energy prices. Using plex just to having easy access to my music collection. Now need to find good alternative for plexamp.
This is truly the biggest bummer since Plexamp is a really nice audio player.
Other alternative that is usable I found is Roon. Though it has big flaw. No desktop app for Linux :(
Yuck. I have to prop up a server and pay a monthly fee? They’re not doing that much for me.
I abandoned my lifetime plex license long ago. It’s the sunk cost fallacy, some people are immune to it and others aren’t. Quite obviously some people here aren’t, because they still defend plex.
I won’t defend Plex, but Jellyfin just isn’t quite there as an alternative yet. Their ATV app leaves still leaves a lot to be desired. I’m hoping it gets there sooner than later though so I can finally jump ship. The only other thing I really want is some tool to migrate the “watched” status of all my content to Jellyfin.
Only reason I haven’t switched is cause many of my users are clueless boomers and no matter how painless the switch should be it won’t be for them 😂
I’ll probably switch to Jellyfin in the near future anyway tho since Plex just keeps getting enshittified
I just run them side by side on the same nuc. All my friends still use Plex though I think because the apps look nicer. I wish jellyfin had federated features so that you could choose to use a single account across many friends instances. I still use Plex because I don’t want to deal with syncing watched status between instances.
Jellyfin is incredibly simple to use. It’s even incredibly simple to setup.
Room for more users?
Sorry, no. But you can probably stream anything you want here: https://movie-web.app/search/movie
I’ve been using Plex because it’s what I heard the most about and I liked that it has native apps everywhere. Wasn’t so tempted by Jellyfin since, even as a web developer, I’m not fond of web apps on other platforms. However, it’s starting to be tempting to switch…
Id youre not using it can i have the old account with lifetime?
I’m not sure if you are being serious, but for obvious reasons NO
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ITT: People who don’t use Plex proudly talking about how they don’t use Plex.
This move makes sense to me. They could be liable for what’s hosted in the cloud, and on top of that you can’t pay for access, and the host is known as a great place to let people do that.
I really don’t understand the people who use jellyfin but insist on shitting on Plex. You can both use jellyfin and not also not be smug about it. It’s the same reason people are tired of the Linux user or back in the day why android users were so annoying.
They could be liable for what’s hosted in the cloud
Liable for something hosted on someone’s private VPS? That’s like saying Apache or Nginx is liable if someone uses it to host a torrent site. I don’t really buy it tbh.
I really don’t understand the people who use jellyfin but insist on shitting on Plex.
I think people are allowed to critique and express disappointment over a product that they paid for. Just because you personally don’t care about the direction of Plex doesn’t mean other users can’t express their valid viewpoints. Plex at one point said they didn’t really care what people put up on their private servers and now they’re dialing that back and essentially asserting control over what people already paid for. People are right to be upset.
That’s like saying Apache or Nginx is liable if someone uses it to host a torrent site. I don’t really buy it tbh.
Tell that to your company’s team of lawyers who are telling you just to take it down. Even if it’s a grey area legal will tell you just to be proactive and avoid the whole thing. Plus like I said, charging for access is against ToS anyway, and most hosters who do that use this cloud service. Few bad apples spoil the bunch as they say.
and I’m cool with valid viewpoints, but god is everyone in this thread saying the same lazy thing. “Plex is trash, I dumped it, get Jellyfin”. Like okay, I get it, can we not have 98% of the thread talking about Plex just saying “It’s trash”. At least some of them have valid criticism you’re talking about, and I’m all for that, but I’m just over the pure vomit that most of these comments are. You’re criticism is valid and makes sense, the lazy comments just saying “lol I switched to Jellyfin” are just annoying to me. Great, high five to you.
Don’t say, someone else’s opinions /comments are annoying to you?
I suppose the correct solution is to ask everyone else to not post what annoys you, right?
I think the point was, if you’re not actively adding to the discussion, and instead are just giving the whole"kek, I use jellyfin", then rather stfu, it’s already been said 100x in the comments.
That’s a nonsense point.
You are assuming that everyone reading the topic knows everything you do. People don’t.
The very reason I am using Jellyfin is because in some Plex thread on reddit, months ago, random people said something along the lines of “Lol, you should have used Jellyfin”.
I knew that Plex was (although I did not use it myself) so I went to see what Jellyfin is. Once I saw what it does (amazingly well) and how simple it is to setup, I set it up. I am an old fart, I don’t have time to follow everything anymore so I truly did not know about Jellyfin.
And that’s the story of how I found out about Jellyfin. By someone loling in the tread about Plex.
But hey, everyone should just do what the guy upstairs want, so he doesn’t get upset.
It is reasonable.
Okay, so how many times does it need to be said in one place? I’m counting 60 here right now… I’m pretty sure after the first 10 comments you’d have picked up on it.
Agreed. They’re trying to kill off Plex Shares, where people are essentially using their software to run their own for-profit streaming service using pirated content. This shit affects all of us as it brings on lawsuits and new laws to combat just so some random dude can make some extra cash selling access.
Good thing I didn’t get a lifetime pass back when it was on sale, was kind of tempting a couple years ago
I understand what you’re saying here, but I want to let you know that it just sounds like “sour grapes”.
It sounds like this provider is allowing something that could put Plex in legal hot water; why would they allow this and potentially jeopardize everything for all Plex users?
A lot of people self host so they are in control. This is Plex taking away that control, plain and simple.
I don’t know how many people host completely legitimately acquired content in their libraries, but your reasoning is such a cop out. Are you gonna defend them if they start scanning libraries for potentially illegally obtained content and blocking that because it could “put them in legal hot water?”
I’m not here to argue & you’ve got some good points. I am defending no one; this isn’t a situation where I’m in the “hail corporate” camp.
The minute Plex started taking money back in 2012, anyone who thought Plex was still creating this product+service out of the goodness of their hearts has been missing the point. The writing has been on the wall for 10+ years.
