cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639

I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That’s it folks. I’ve been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.

They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.

I’ll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I’ve been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it’s time to make it production ready.

Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.

And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:

  • YES I know I’m unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
  • My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don’t understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn’t have to, that’s why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
  • Plex is still removing functionality. I don’t care that “People should pay their fair share”. If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that’s completely okay. They are removing functionality.
    • “But they have cloud costs”. Remote streaming is negligible to them. It’s a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That’s it.
    • “Good luck finding another remote streaming” - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that’s a separate conversation). All “remote streaming” is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported “free” content that they’re probably losing money on.

In short, I don’t care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They’re removing functionality that has been free for years. I’m not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.

  • FreedomAdvocateEnglish
    933·
    12 hours ago

    You have a plex pass though, so nothing changed for you - you just got all angry because you didn’t read the email properly.

    Your users are going to be much worse off now than they were, and you will absolutely lose a bunch of them who don’t want to (or can’t) have to connect to a VPN every time they want to stream from your library.

    • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
      63·
      8 hours ago

      Why would they need to connect to a VPN every time they connect to Jellyfin?

      • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        8 hours ago

        Jellyfin has some security issues that, depending on who you ask, are either critical vulnerabilities that make it completely unsafe to expose to the Internet or largely unconcerning for regular users.

        • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
          31·
          7 hours ago

          I’m not overly concerned about my instance running behind a reverse proxy. Perhaps I am just naive…

          • MaggiWuerze@feddit.orgEnglish
            3·
            6 hours ago

            Honestly yeah. The Jellyfin Backend is basically unauthenticated for a large part, allowing anyone to map and stream your content as soon as they guessed the ids, which isn’t that hard, since they are based on the paths on your device. So if your movie sits in /mnt/media/movies/the_bee_movie that is pretty esay to guess and calculate the id from, allowing anyone to stream that content from your server

            • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
              11·
              6 hours ago

              And apart from an undesirable bandwidth usage resulting from someone guessing their way to my file structure, how can this be used to compromise my server?

              • MaggiWuerze@feddit.orgEnglish
                2·
                5 hours ago

                They can stream content from your server or map out what you have on there by using a rainbow table. Depending on the country you live in they can and will use that combined with your IP to start litigating you

                • dogs0n@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  12·
                  5 hours ago

                  My question is, where are you posting the address to your jellyfin server that someone who finds it will go through the trouble of even doing this?

                  Also how could they start litigating you based on the content you have? If I had illegal content on my server, I would be really dumb to expose it on the internet on a public jellyfin server. Otherwise my movies, tv, etc are my paid for content…

                  • MaggiWuerze@feddit.orgEnglish
                    4·
                    5 hours ago

                    You don’t need to post it. Bots are scanning every ip, 24/7, looking for servers to infect, endpoints to abuse and data to extract.

                    Go set up a ssh tarpit on your server and watch the flies drown in it. I will not expose anything on my server that has so many known vulnerabilities

                    Your content might be legitimate, but the vast majority use Plex and Jellyfin as a media Server for pirated content and still want to share it with their friends or family. And just FYI, most blurays and DVDs also forbid this kind of sharing in their license

    • dogs0n@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12·
      5 hours ago

      you will absolutely lose a bunch of them

      I always see this and I have to ask: why do you care?

      They likely aren’t paid customers of yours, if they don’t follow your rules and the software you like to use, then they are free to use any other method of consuming media.

      VPN

      Have to agree with the other comment that asks why do you need to use a vpn. Fax