I've never understood why Plex phones home or why Plex the company has any insight at all into what's running on your Plex installation. I was never able to look past that, so I never installed it.
After years without a media server, I've started using Jellyfin and it's great. It's self-hosted but still has decent client apps. And there's no sketchy corporation watching my server, which just runs on my laptop and streams to my phone via my local network.
I've used Plex and I also don't like the way they do business, so it's gone now.
I really like the Chromecast model, browsing on a mobile device to select content is just a much better UX. I'm planning to implement Jellyfin (on NAS) + Kodi (on TOX3 streamer), and I just found Yatse [1] which claims to be able to control them. Has anyone here tried a combo like this?
> I really like the Chromecast model, browsing on a mobile device to select content is just a much better UX.
I feel the same. I have a Kodi setup with LibreELEC and I just feel like it does too much and is inconvenient for my use. I don't really want to build and manage a "media library" on the device that's playing back content (small NUC-like computer connected to a projector). I wish I could just send a file to it from my computer or phone and instantly play it back without having to go through the whole media center style UI thing.
Yes, I got my old Chromecast to work with Jellyfin. Heads up: You'll have to redirect DNS from 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to your router if you'd like to use a local hostname (i.e. in your LAN), though, otherwise the Chromecast will never use your DHCP advertised DNS service.
When I used a Chromecast, I was fond of an even more direct method. On my laptop I ran a Node CLI called "peercast" [0] with a single argument (a magnet link), and it streamed a video file while downloading its torrent, and since it called the torrent library directly, it could prioritize downloading the earlier chunks of the file so I could start streaming the video before the download completed.
It looks like that repo hasn't been updated in a while, although it might still work. It's an offshoot of peerflix [1], a Node CLI that streams video from a torrent to an h264 playlist. So without peercast I would just open my browser to the local network address where peerflix was hosting the h264 playlist, and use the Cast button to stream it to my device (which I believe technically means Chromecast "takes over" downloading the playlist, rather than my laptop pushing the video to it, so I just needed to use a URL with the LAN IP of my computer).
You might be interested in the https://libreelec.tv/ project.
Kodi for low end devices. Which uses HDMI CEC to allow for your tv remote to control the Kodi interface.
> I really like the Chromecast model, browsing on a mobile device to select content is just a much better UX
I couldn't disagree more. Non-touchscreen remotes (RIP Harmony hub) are far superior as is browsing on the TV. I like the separation of concerns, others in the room can see what I'm doing on the screen, and I'm never scrambling to open an app to pause/rewind/etc.
My pet theory is that people who feel this way have only used low-end set-top boxes (or ones built into the TV which are low-end) and/or have used crappy remotes.
Personally I believe that a touch screen mobile device is a degraded experience for any UX. This is just the cheapest way to manufacture a device so it's what has won out. But I hate the lack of tactile feedback and avoid using my phone for anything I can
Agreed. That's why the Harmony Hub + Remote was/is the best option on the market. No touch screen, just buttons, I can operate it "blind", I don't have to point it at anything (I've left it in my pocket while cooking and I can reach in and play/pause/navigate all without even taking it out of my pocket). The battery (a coin battery) lasts somewhere in the 6 months - 1 year range, I literally have no idea because it's so rare that I have to update it.
It's a shame that Harmony has left the remote business. Sofabaton is the closest to what my Harmony's can provide but they have a screen on the remote which I'd really rather do without. If my Harmony Hubs died today I'd probably get an X1 (though I actually like the design of the U2 way more) but I'm really hoping that I can ride the Harmony wave a little longer until a real spiritual successor comes out.
> people who feel this way have only used low-end set-top boxes
Yes I was thinking about this when I wrote it. All the set top boxes I've seen are crap with terrible UI latency and are slow to load new data. I'll admit that maybe it's possible to make it slightly less crap. But there's no way in hell typing out something on a remote with left-left-left-left-left-left-left-down click right-right-right-right-right-up click down-down-left click up-left-left-left-left click is remotely (ha) a good experience compared to a phone keyboard. And if I'm gonna have a device with a whole damn keyboard on it... it might as well be my phone.
I get that. And while I know "Apple" is a non-starter for some people I love my Apple TV for this reason. It's responsive, loads my plex library and lets me navigate it easily, and anytime I hit a text area I get a notification on my phone that I can tap and enter text from my phone. It's sort of the best of both worlds. Manually entering text via remote does suck, 100% agree.
I used Yatse for many years to control xbmc then Kodi. Always worked well enough though requires to be talk with the media center on the same network so might have to shut VPN and such. I've never tried with jellyfin as I now have a physical remote for my Kodi set top box.
Plex collects plenty of information to identify who is running these servers and who the users are. I suspect resellers put layers of obfuscation in place.
What would Plex gain from collecting information about user content ?
Is Plex capable of collecting user content information if requested by authorities ?
Yeah, these "excepts" I don't trust at all. Facebook only collected phone numbers for 2fa, then used them for advertising, sometimes debug builds ship instead of prod builds and then everything you type is collected into a plaintext file on your computer, and data leaks all the time. When I use a software like this, I fully expect the data to be public (or given to authorities) at a point, and separate my concerns accordingly.
> or why Plex the company has any insight at all into what's running on your Plex installation
They actually don't. Open this link and CTRL-F for "Plex does not collect:"
This is also why Plex isn't tied into the Apple TV features like universal search and deep linking into the "Uo Next" feature that shows you what you're watching in all your apps. They'd have to break this to provide that data to Apple
Honestly, there are few apolitical things I come across in my day to day life that have as much misinformation slung at them than Plex does. The “begrudging user” community is incredibly toxic. It really does seem like half the people there are there to tell you about how some other thing they’re using is supposedly better despite them lingering in hope that whatever they have a gripe with has been fixed. It’s one of the few times I’ve actually gone as far as to semi-regularly comment on Plex hate threads online just to say that I’m for the most part a happy and content user, on the off chance that someone on the team sees it.
Ditto, not sure why everyone hates on plex so much. Sure they do some dumb stuff- but overall media handling capability has improved. I am still pissed about camera upload and podcast support. But not enough for all the reddit user rage I see.
I tried Jellyfin, doesn't work for most things, went back to plex. Everything just works. My use case is pretty simple, family photos and videos but somehow that was problematic.
I’ve never had any issues with jellyfin. Maybe your use case is outside of what it’s for, but for watching series and movies it worked with everything I could throw at it for me.
you've most likely never tried to view subtitles. It's well known that its subtitle support isn't so good (to put it lightly). It seems to be unable to stream subtitles out of an MKV itself and has to extract them and send them separately. (or at least thats what it seems like from observation).
But if you use ASS subtitles, which are entirely unspecified and unsupported and only have a single working implementation that requires half of Wine to work correctly, well, then you're fucked.
I use subtitles all the time and they work really well for me - both embedded and separate files. I'm streaming from an SSD though, maybe that makes a difference?
Somehow my Jellyfin Android TV app became incompatible with the server application on my home PC and I can no longer watch videos, so had to head back to Plex or Kodi+NFS mounts.
You were likely unlucky with the client you used. I host a small server for family and friends. Some seem to go great (browser, roku, android(to an extent)), but others seem to have a whole myriad of issues. I've ended up just putting a roku in the hands of people i give access to.
have the Jellyfin integration running on Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 4B, works brilliantly for music, movies and series. Appears to have no support for photos. Android & Roku apps are fast and seem to have less network buffering than Plex, no 3rd party accounts or logins needed, on Plex I had to keep logging in every few days not sure what the issue was.
Please be careful with backing up photos with immich.
They define uniqueness as "${filename-with-extensions}-${filesize}".
How many times does your system have IMG_4223.jpg? I got many. Different cameras, iPhones, etc, all started at IMG_0000.jpg.
How often does the file size collide? I don't have stats, but the reason I know this is because I had multiple occasions of failed backups and imports.
That is terrible. I have a number of issue reports open with immich but didn't know about this particular snag. Has this been reported to their GitHub?
The notice does not specify the provider, but I host my Plex server on Hetzner and received the notice. (And I don't host any pirated material, nor share my server with anyone else. This is beyond infuriating.)
I also host with Hetzner and I also received the notice. The consensus on reddit and the plex forums is that the hosting provider in question is Hetzner.
Very poor decision on Plex's part. I've been using the service for over 8 years and will now have to start considering alternatives.
You may not be hosting pirated material, but apparently it is popular to setup a plex server in hetzner and an auto-torrenter, and then sell access to it.
If they're all authenticating centrally for access to these servers and I assume lots of accounts per server, they could just stick a fair client limit on accounts (eg limit the number of new clients from multiple IPs, existing clients could roam networks without limit).
What they're proposing seems like a very shortsighted grasp for the cheapest solution, ignoring the fact that many paid users are looking at Jellyfish et al.
It might be popular but in forums people generally advocate against since their tos has clauses for that, while there are seed box friendly hosts elsewhere
It basically gives me Netflix for all the content in the world, would recommend! Put.io does instant downloads if anyone else on the service has ever downloaded the content, which is basically always the case for me.
To actually answer your question without snark, it’s still miles behind. I give the competition a shot once every year or two to see what’s up. It’s never even close for someone that prioritises the things that I prioritise. Every Plex competitor I’ve used makes me feel like I’m using a Linux media player in 2008. Some people get off to that. I don’t.
For some reason the best clients are on Apple devices only, that Infuse and Swiftfin. mpv shim is ok too. That’s my only gripe since I barely touch the actual Jellyfin server interface, it just works. If I had Plex I would also use Infuse too so there’s really no difference except that one is open source, doesn’t phone home, and doesn’t require a monthly subscription.
Is there a benefit to using Infuse over NFS vs Infuse connecting to Plex? Wouldn't you lose Plex's ability to customize everything (naming, album art, collections, watchlist), not to mention syncing with other non Apple devices in the house.
The title of the movie is in the file name, I search what I want to watch and it comes up, what more would customization do for me? Sounds like a time sink.
I never had any desire to sync with a device. The movies are from the internet. I don’t want to deal with any hardware uptime or compatibility issues. When I see friends use each other’s Plex servers, half of the time the movie doesn’t play properly because it’s transcoding or something and they spend several minutes fiddling with settings (sometimes not succeeding). Never had this problem streaming from Google Drive with Infuse.
Infuse have similar customization, you mainly loose sync to nonapple devices and you cant do transcoding for slow internet connections. The advantage is that you dont need something that can host plex, just a dumb fileshare (or a cloud drive like icloud or google drive). Many routers can fx do the fileshare for you, so you dont need a server to host on.
So they do.. but everyone needs it. For my Plex, I paid for lifetime and gave accounts to my mother and brother and a few friends. With infuse, everyone needs to pony up. That is a non starter for our use case. Glad to know they do offer it though.
I don't understand. What does Plex care if it's hosted on a cloud IaaS provider or on own equipment or VM? It's not Plex's business to police what I or anyone else does with software. If someone is selling access to pirated content using Plex, the solution is to handle the cases individually rather than kindergarten class punishment of particular server providers.
Plex is trying to reinvent itself, 10 years too late, as the next Roku. By changing the product's focus and drumming up anti-piracy PR like this, they're whitewashing the brand. That's why every major update of the software takes it farther from the thing you purchased (a nice frontend for your downloaded movie collection) and closer to something you don't want -- a bunch of recommendations for streaming services you've never heard of, while burying your media library ever deeper in the default UI.
It's yet another form of Cory Doctrow's enshittification.
Five years from now, Plex will have gone public or been acquired, probably by Facebook so that we can have Facebook TV for a couple years before that shuts down. The original Plex userbase will have long left for a better product.
This was the wake-up call me and my friends needed to stop using this proprietary piece of garbage. I moved to Jellyfin this morning and I was pleasantly surprised that unlike a few years ago, the Swiftfin app now works well on both iOS and tvOS.
This kind of move by Plex only highlights that even though you’re running the server, they still feel they have the right to break your application at any time for reasons they decide. For me that’s completely unacceptable and I won’t spend a cent with them again.
That’s pushing it. You’re entitled to dislike that it’s proprietary, but Plex works great. You can like an alternative better without shitting on Plex for no reason
2) The UI regularly tries to convince me to look at their junk TV/movie sales pages.
3) The UI doesn't provide proper feedback during the media library tagging/discovery process.
4) Oh yeah even though it's hosted in my network only using resources in my network, it feels the need to call home regularly.
Sorry, you seemed confused, and I'm not the person you're replying to, but I thought I'd help you out anyway. This list isn't comprehensive, but it should at least help you understand people might actually be shitting on Plex for actual reasons that exist :)
You might be upset that I chose to convey my data in a tone you dislike, but don't pretend my reasons aren't valid. Also, practice what you preach-- community guidelines say to flag and move on if you find objectionable behavior.
It's telling that you chose to avoid addressing the content of what I said in favor of shifting focus to tone.
Doesn’t help. I disagree on 1, I actually like Plex UI and it mostly works fine for me. It’s especially useful in that I have official apps everywhere (tv, smartphone, laptop), I can chromecast, and I can download movies locally on my phone. All that reliably.
For 2, it’s just a tab you can hide no? I think I had that the first time I used Plex, but I’ve not seen that in months…
3 is true, the discovery process is too opaque, especially when it doesn’t find one of your files.
4 is not a UI complaint but a technical complaint.
Your statement has achieved nothing as it doesn't address that it is a frustration users have (I'm not the only one) that might incline someone to thinking a product is garbage; "I disagree" is a moot point, as the behavior discussed influences user experience and opinion. I don't know how to make that more clear.
> For 2, it’s just a tab you can hide no?
What's your point? I don't want it. I don't want to see it. It's advertising garbage to me. I will choose products that don't do that and rank products that do as closer to garbage than products that don't.
> 3 is true
It's also essential to the most important feature of Plex: Parse my fucking media and let me search and view it. It is core functionality and it's garbage.
> 4 is not a UI complaint but a technical complaint.
I wasn't aware we were being restricted to complaining just about the UI of Plex. Can you show me where this goalpost was established? I must have missed it. As Plex is a self-hosted application, non-UI behavior is relevant to the user experience. This includes the setup and operational process.
> You can like an alternative better without shitting on Plex for no reason
Have you not noticed the topic you are commenting on? It's pretty clear why Plex is now unusable for a significant number of users. Other commenters likened Plex to a honeypot. How did you fail to be aware of that fact?
It's not though. You are both speaking in hyperbole. Plex is actually objectively better than Jellyfin. Skipping intros still doesn't work consistently in Jellyfin.
But it is a company and I am glad that there is serious competition from Jellyfin. It isn't a publicly traded company, so pressure from an open source product can push it to be better and not necessarily turn it in to a money grab that makes the product shit. They've made some missteps the community hasn't liked, but they have also had improvements as well.
That's a recipe for an unhappy life IMHO. If I stopped using every service/product/business that did things I didn't approve of I'd be compiling my own linux distro (kill me) and probably growing all my food (of course where are you going to morally get some of the seeds you need?).
This kind of black/white thinking is harmful. Plex "just works" for the family I share it with, I have zero interest in being 24/7 tech support so I don't use things like Jellyfin. If this UI/UX improves enough then I might consider it but everyone I've shared my Plex with has been able to use it without peppering me with 100 questions. I seriously doubt the same would be true for Jellyfin.
You can just buy IPTV and and a Chromecast and disregard the headache of everything else. Megacubo for pCs. Plex was great but they have slowly just destroyed their brand loyalty.
IPTV sounds like a poor replacement for paying for access to content you don't control on someone else's Plex server, not a replacement for running your own Plex server with only content you want.
agree, it may have shortcomings but "piece of garbage" is something that does not fit, its one of the longest running apps of its kind with the largest user base of superfans
It is a large codebase with a mix of new and legacy (Emby) modules. Errors or intermittent issues seem common, and nobody really seems to understand what's happening.
Many of the dependencies, especially for the legacy modules, are old or deprecated with numerous CVEs. Some functionality involves dispatching commands to external binaries.
Overall it seems like a product that works, but isn't necessarily well designed. A critical vulnerability was discovered earlier this year, and I feel that a security audit would more than likely result in a few more.
Is it possible to import "watched" and the placeholders and other user metadata? I'd switch, but i'm not willing to wipe out everyone's metadata to accomplish it, especially as I have a lifetime plex pass
Interesting that Plex is taking on the risk here, rather than the service provider that hosts the content (or more accurately, the user who hosts content on said service provider).
I suspect they'd prefer to pass the hot potato to Hetzner but their lawyers told them otherwise.
Plex has been collecting user data for awhile now. The notice recommends hosting your server at home, tying the consumed media to a specific ip that can be used to tie to a specific person.
Honesty, I think Plex is a honeypot and is going to be used to start massive legal suites against people.
I doubt that it's a honeypot , they have been slowly banning private plex4shares for a while now this isn't new , they are all moving to other server/clients now
>tying the consumed media to a specific ip that can be used to tie to a specific person.
A server in a data center will also have a specific IP tied to a specific person (customer of data center or ISP), assuming the server is supposed to be remotely accessible in a reliable way.
I wonder the same thing. It had a lot of 'renegade cool kid' energy early on, I suspect this was done on purpose. However, if you look at the investors, and people working on the project now (lot of industry types) it's moved slowly into the corporate sphere. I think rather than legal assault, they are going to slowly start to boil the frog and users will find themselves in a system that differs radically from what they expected (or want) and by that time moving all their files etc will be too much.
I stayed far away, and have supported Kodi the entire time.
> In 2019, Plex launched an ad-supported streaming service of movies, television shows and music that is accessible from its applications. [1]
Advertising, and operating their own streaming service, presumably involves business partnerships with entities that may not look fondly on self-hosting?
I wonder if their forced login puts them in a position where they’re going to end up doing surveillance and betraying their users that are pirating content.
Interesting. I'd thought that Plex was a self-hosted streaming platform? Am I to understand that while they may provide that functionality, they are maintaining another set of servers in the stream that can be used to cut off end users from streaming backends on servers that are operated by private individuals? I.e. I set up plex for myself, use their app, and then conceivably they have a gatekeeping capability that could cut me off from my own stream box?
If that's the case, then WTF Plex? If I actually cared, that'd be a custom Server/client rewrite and loss of business from me.
It's also very polished, supports a lot of formats and has apps for a lot of smart TVs and setup boxes and great matching. They have been doing some steps in a direction I'm not interested in lately but so far everything still works nicely and I'm not ready to abandon it.
Personally I don't care much about adding the free to watch content with ads or anything related to linear tv, but that's just my personal opinion. They didn't touch the personal media collection use case in a negative way, so for me nothing changed.
Plex clients require central authentication. They don't work without logging in. So it's reasonably trivial for them to add a check in the loop that says "if hetzner then abort".
Use both Plex and Emby. This does not concern me since I think of Plex the same way as I think about a SIP provider. They provide the connection brokering so my devices and my server can handshake.
I have Emby as a backup because some media might have issues with transcode on plex. Jellyfin is a distant third for me due to transcode issues with hdr 4k content. (When last tested)
Either way, my content is for me- still not sure why people are crazy enough to pirate a ton of crap, buy space on a cloud provider then sell it on reddit.
I am sure the backlash on this move will be on par with when Plex said they wanted to collect media hashes and everyone swiftly raged at them.
The sad thing is Plex used to be awesome they killed camera upload and their podcast product is garbage cloud only trash. Plexamp is awesome. It just blows my mind they they don't create a podcast polling module where you can store data locally.
All of their recent focus has been on trying to be a multi streaming site aggregator. If they took a lesson from ye olden dogpile I think they would see this is a bad cart to hitch your horse to- they really need to get back to self hosted stuff.
This ticks me off... But their DVR and advert removal tooling for live TV tuners still rocks and I use for accessing my CATV and OTA channels.
Someday I will drop them- this is just another bad choice by very schizophranic leadership at Plex.
Plexamp is my main Android auto car music app, maybe I drop them for all but my live TV and music use?
Curious why Emby is not brought up more- I love it much more than jellyfin for stability.
I've been meaning to migrate Plex to Jellyfin. I don't even host at Hetzner, but this coming at the end of the week is perfect -- I'm going to do the migration this weekend!
I have used Infuse for years. I just use a basic NAS with a torrent client and a watch folder. I have pretty fast broadband too, so all together it’s a really nice experience. Plus the devices I’m usually watching from are an iPad, Mac or Apple TV anyway, so it works super nicely for me. I’ve never really understood the appeal of Plex to be honest.
People are selling access to their Plex servers. Those servers are often hosted on Hetzner and Plex took the lazy way out and are blasting _all_ Hetzner hosted servers.
I just have my home pc set up as a media server and I share my videos folder across the network. I have a roku with a basic file browsing app that let's me see the files and I just use that. Never quite understood why an entire server and app was required for something that has been supported natively by any OS for years
1. People rent Hetzner servers to load-up with movies
2. They sell access to those servers to multiple users (sometimes dozens).
3. The opinion is also that Hetzner is a cesspool of the Internet:
>> Hetzner seems to be a cesspit of internet, outside of russia. They're more than willing to host Indian scammers VoIP systems, as well as scam websites. They're willing to host just about anything as long as they aren't responsible for the content, and you don't get caught.
>> hetzner is the worst. whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner
> 3. The opinion is also that Hetzner is a cesspool of the Internet:
>
> >> Hetzner seems to be a cesspit of internet, outside of russia. They're more > than willing to host Indian scammers VoIP systems, as well as scam websites. They're willing to host just about anything as long as they aren't responsible for the content, and you don't get caught.
>
> >> hetzner is the worst. whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner
That is just a direct consequence of their popularity while being among the cheapest of the big popular ones.
Hetzner also have a reputation for taking the bare minimum action possible about abuse reports.
Personally I'm entirely happy with taking the risk of services blocking Hetzner in return for everything else about their service, but it isn't -just- a consequence of their popularity.
The pirate hosters could just stay at Hetzner, deploy a lightweight proxy somewhere else and Plex'd none the wiser. And/or just move their servers elsewhere.
"I am sorry ma'am, I see you drove here in a Dodge. We are prohibiting entry for all Dodge drivers because Dodge drivers are overrepresented in criminal incidents"
---
Quote from the Plex forum thread:
> I hope everyone is paying very close attention to the message that Plex is communicating here because it is contrary to their previous stance regarding hosting Plex Media Server in the ‘cloud’.
> > But our personal media server was always designed and intended for users to host themselves at home for personal user, not in a shared hosting environment
> Great. Plex Inc. is now on record stating that the intended use of Plex Media Server is to be hosted at home. The writing is on the wall for anyone else hosting Plex via a hosting provider, such as OVH. Do not be surprised if they follow through with their statement to blanket-ban any ISP that harbors individuals that violate their Terms of Service. It no longer matters if your individual use case is legitimate or not – it can and will be disturbed if the company deems it necessary.
The hypothesized future pivot of Plex to start competing with Netflix and try to shed their cannibalizing self-hosting side fits in.
It sounds like AWS dodged such an accusation by making their services extremely and unfairly expensive. Otherwise I'd bet it would become: "whenever we have an attack at work, 99 out of 100 times its coming from AWS".
Abusers are smart enough to design their architecture to avoid vendor lock-in, so they head to whoever provides cheapest traffic.
It seems like their real problem is with cheap hosting. Hetzner is just the most popular one. Calling it the cespool of the internet makes it sound like one of the Eastern European hosts that don't take services down unless really forced, which isn't the case with hetzner.
> They're more than willing to host Indian scammers VoIP systems, as well as scam websites. They're willing to host just about anything as long as they aren't responsible for the content, and you don't get caught.
Are they, though? Has something changed? Because I remember that when I made a Hetzner account, I had to verify my ID and everything. It's actually been the same with some other companies like Contabo, despite me always having been an EU citizen and all that.
> whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner
Wasn't DigitalOcean pretty much the "leader" in this regard a while back? Maybe something has indeed changed, who knows!
Hetzner do scan their networks for open proxies, spam mailing etc. They are supper aggressive on copyright too, as in you can just email them claiming an ip hosts copy right material and they will by default firewall that ip until the server owner responds.
I know this because I used to host a paste bin with them and they would constantly block my ip because people would post links to other sites that had copyright material. I didn't host anything illegal all you could post was 1mb of text. Hetzner would show me the copy right claim and it was always from some random hotmail address, the urls of the infringing material don't resolve to my ip and very clearly had nothing to do with me. Hetzner didn't care they blocked all of my servers until I had resolved the dmca request.
I had to stop using Hetzner because their blocking was too aggressive and I wasn't doing anything illegal anyway. Maybe this is self fulfilling as I would never use them for anything important after that experience, I can't risk them taking down production simply because some one with a hotmail account asked them too.
> hetzner is the worst. whenever we have an attack at work, 7 out of 10 times its coming from hetzner
I suspect this is a lot more of the motivation than people using hetzner to host pirated Plex libraries. Plex is pretty pirate-friendly.
I’ve certainly experienced the waves of malicious bot traffic coming from hetzner IPs, where blocking hetzner is a convenient and easy solution. If my customers were using hetzner, I’d have to find a better and more difficult solution. I understand why Plex would want to get their legitimate users to stop using the IP ranges they want to block at the firewall level.
i mean their whole platform is built to suit the needs of people who pirate movies and TV. it's a system purpose-built for watching pirated content. they might pretend it isn't to attract investors and avoid drawing the ire of authorities, but we all know what it is.
One is VC funded darling from US.
Other is more than 20 yo german infrastructure company that doesnt do marketing and starts to slowly eat from the AWS pie because they are cheap.
Yes, a few years back there was another german youtuber who also had some promo ad for hetzner. Though the amount of ads is pretty limited compared to others like Linode.
Probably not true that they let anything run given that they shut down all proof of stake blockchain nodes because they were bitcoin miners (or at least that's how their reasoning went).
Hetzner is a garbage company when trying to host there as a legitimate SaaS creator. Stay far, far away from them. They disabled access to my server for running tailscale.
tailscale runs a continuous netcheck to an unroutable IP (203.0.113.1:12345:UDP) [1] for whatever reason. This triggered Hetzner's ghetto-ass DDOS protection, thinking my server was compromised or I was netscanning the world. They sent me an email saying my server was compromised and I had 24hrs to remedy it.
I responded to the email and filled out this attestation form declaring that my server was not under attack, it was a false positive, and explained what they were seeing (not to mention it's an unroutable IP). They still null routed my server and refused to turn it back on, and their arrogant support told me there was no way I was in control of this server etc. They took my box offline during a peak user day, so I migrated to AWS and never looked back.
Don't do anything of importance on Hetzner. No wonder they only get people running pirated plex boxes.
Contrary to this i run lots of stuff on Hetzner no problem. Even with Tailscale. Running solid VPSes in this day and age is not rocket science as AWS wants everyone to think.
Maybe they've added a fix to their detection system since? I quite literally have a netscan abuse report from them filled with the above UDP IP and port.
I'm most familiar with AWS so I went back to a trusted (and far more expensive) platform where I didn't have to deal with amateurs literally turning off a paid service.
I may explore OVH in the future, nothing against them at all.
I've bought my first 4K TV and tried to view my videos. And Plex App constantly stutter and saying that my connection is not enough (seem like TV were not able to decode fast enough).
But Jellyfin showed everything instantly and without stutter.
Deleted Plex - as there is no reason to maintain both.
The only real issue I've seen with Jellyfin has been some stuttering on older clients (specifically, very old and crappy webOS TVs). I'm not sure whether this is a weak hardware problem, a network problem, or something else. Other than that, it's been very smooth.
(Context: I was a Plex user and self-hoster for about 7 years, and switched to self-hosted Jellyfin about 2 years ago.)
Subtitles don't work for the most part though, so a bit of a non-starter here as I sometimes have to be quiet, and my SO has a slight hearing loss making dialog difficult to hear.
This is very much a YMMV situation. They work for me, both in the web UI, the native app, and in the Kodi plugin. I think it may have to do with where your subtitles are coming from and/or how something is configured.
If you have a device that can run it, I find that Kodi is the best frontend for JF. It has a lot of extra features that the normal client doesn't.
I have had that issue from time to time. What I did to solve that was to install plugin to extract the subtitle. Now it works perfectly (on webos tv client at least).
After years without a media server, I've started using Jellyfin and it's great. It's self-hosted but still has decent client apps. And there's no sketchy corporation watching my server, which just runs on my laptop and streams to my phone via my local network.