Appears to be Hetzner for now, wouldn’t be surprised if all VPS get affected eventually.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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You have to port forward for Plex as well.
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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.
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That’s still port forwarding. It’s just automated.
A well-configured network that follows security best practices should always have UPnP disabled.
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I switched to Jellyfin a long time ago and I don’t regret it at all. Even for non-techie friends and family the experience has been more pleasant.
Yeah. it was just pure lazyness on my part. I had Plex setup and all and didn’t want to bother with something new.
I have both side by side syncing with each other. Plex is still better then jellyfin. It’s just more polished has more features and isess buggy. Saying that I use jellyfin all the time but not ready to move others over.
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!
Jellyfin ftw
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I’ve had no trouble setting up jellyfin on Roku, Google/Android, and FireTV. It seems AppleTV is the only major one lacking support right now, and that will hopefully be addressed soon.
I tried out Plex (and Emby) before Jellyfin and was annoyed how much functionality was locked behind a paywall even though I was hosting the content myself. Jellyfin is completely free and lets me add as many users on as many devices as I damn well please.
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Dear lord! Don’t use the system in a smart tv for anything!
Convenience is key.
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For many many MANY many many reasons
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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…
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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This seems kinda scummy. If someone breaks TOS then ban the one account. I’ve seen for years now people bringing up jellyfin, knew it was coming when I saw this headline. I never tried it because I have iOS devices and an Apple TV, but now I see there are 3rd party apps for jellyfin on iOS/tvos. I may try it out, move if it satisfies my needs.
Been using Jellyfin for about a year, love it. I watch movies and TV shows with my spouse, and listen to my music collection on the go with Finamp.
Works great on desktop Linux, GrapheneOS, and my Steam Deck.
The thing that keeps me from switching to other systems like Jellyfin is that none of them have a music app as good as Plexamp.
I also don’t think their Live TV features are as good. I have a TV antenna and a HDHomeRun and record shows using it.
Have you tried Finamp? Haven’t used it much myself so I don’t have an opinion on that
Haven’t tried Finamp. I did try Jellyamp but it was abandoned and is missing many features.
There’s a lot of unique features in Plexamp that I haven’t seen in other media players.
Probably the most unique is that it does AI analysis of your music (directly on your Plex server, not “in the cloud”) and uses this data for things like suggesting songs that “sound similar” to the one you’re listening to.
It’s got an auto DJ setting that automatically inserts other songs between songs in your playlist, based on some criteria - there’s a few options. It can use the AI analysis data for this.
It has dynamic fades between songs based on volume - if a song is quiet at the end, the fade in to the next song will start sooner. When playing an album in order, it automatically disables the fades and instead uses gapless playback.
It lets you download playlists for listening offline. New songs you add to the playlist will be automatically downloaded.
They also recently made the basic features free for everyone - previously you could only use Plexamp if you had a Plex Pass.
All in all, it’s a really solid media player, available for most platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS)
I recommend infuse over swiftfin. Swiftfin is FOSS, so it has that going for it, but Infuse works better right now.
Heavily agree, a lot of content had issues playing for me with swiftfin. No issues at all with Infuse other than the fact that intro skipper doesn’t work with it
The one thing keeping me off Jellyfin is the fact that Infuse for Apple TV doesn’t have great support for it yet. Infuse is by far the most capable media player on the device, and it has excellent integration with Plex.
Air Video HD and its server software was so smooth. I’ve begged for it to return, but I am only able to use it still because I own old licenses.
It runs great on M1/M2 macOS, iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV. Streams all my content without issue every time.
Infuse is… alright, but it lacks the ability to adjust some things, and I really wish it had a more “list mode” style, and easier setup. I am getting more used to it, but I only use it for some files, where AirVideoHD and VLC play everything.
Who is going to to revive Air Video HD??
Swiftfin isn’t perfect, but Is pretty good on AppleTV.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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Sorry, no. But you can probably stream anything you want here: https://movie-web.app/search/movie
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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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…
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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.
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
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.
Finamp. Literally the same thing but for jellyfin :)
Not even close. Where is the Android auto support?
This would be viable for users who don’t use smart/programmable/dynamic playlists, and the various features backed by a track analysis ML model in plexamp
Finamp with Jellyfin works, or you could look into a pure audio streaming service like Airsonic or Navidrome. They both work with Subsonic ecosystem apps like dSub on android. There’s also Audiobookshelf for audio books.
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.
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.
