It’s really nice of them to fight the good fight while I use Jellyfin instead.
Comment on 4 reasons Plex is turning into the thing it replaced
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Playing devil’s advocate, I understand one point of pressure: Plex doesn’t want to be perceived as a “piracy app.”
See: Kodi. kodi.expert/…/mpaa-warns-increasing-kodi-abuse-po…
To be blunt, that’s a huge chunk of their userbase. And they run the risk of being legally pounded to dust once that image takes hold.
So how do they avoid that? Add a bunch of other stuff, for plausible deniability. And it seems to have worked, as the anti-piracy gods haven’t singled them out like they have past software projects.
To be clear, I’m not excusing Plex. But I can understand such an unspoken motivation.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You may (half) joke, but MPAA attention on Jellyfin would suck.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I’d like to call this “the Ubuntu buffer”.
tatterdemalion@programming.dev 1 week ago
Maybe a dumb question: What exactly could go wrong? Has the MPAA done anything to stifle Kodi?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 week ago
www.comparitech.com/kodi/kodi-piracy-decline/
digital-digest.com/news-64644-Netflix-Amazon-Join…
Based on our research, comparative search volume for “Kodi” has fallen around 85 percent from 2017 to 2022. Google Trends data reveals the dramatic decline started in Q2 of 2017 and has, for the most part, continued that trend up to this point. Consequently, the decline in people searching for Kodi directly relates to the appearance of the coordinated attack against piracy in the form of ACE.
And this is with Kodi furiously distancing itself from pirates at the time.
Attacks don’t have to be direct. Though they absolutely can be, too.
AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Which doesn’t have half the features and crap security compared to Plex/Emby.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 week ago
The security thing is ironic because my personal Jellyfin server (nor anything else on it) has been hacked, but Plex itself has had their database leaked recently. It’s actually the main reason I switched because I don’t like their auth servers being a giant common target.
kieron115@startrek.website 1 week ago
From their blog post about it:
An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication data. Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party.
The passwords were hashed and, I’m inferring from their language, salted per-user as well. Assuming a reasonable length password (complexity doesn’t matter much here, what we want is entropy) it would take a conventional computer tens to hundreds of millions of years to crack one user’s password.
AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 week ago
… my personal Jellyfin server (nor anything else on it) has been hacked…
And I’ve never been attacked by a bear while wearing my goose feather headdress.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
There is that but it’s primarily that they’ve taken over 40 million dollars of venture capital. They are almost certainly under immense pressure to turn profitable asap and converting lifetime pass users into revenue streams somehow, converting new users into SaaS, etc are going to be things they pursue more aggressively.
Don’t take the devils money if you don’t want the devils stipulations
kieron115@startrek.website 1 week ago
They’ve taken other measures as well. Nobody knows the details besides them, but they blocked an entire cloud provider called Hetzner because too many people were using it for pirate Plex servers. They absolutely have to maintain the image of being legitimate.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Sure, apart from charging for remote access.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That serves the purpose too. It’s harder to pin Plex as an “illegal distribution service” when you have to pay for access, as means either the streamer or “distributor” can’t be very anonymous.
On the other hand, the more money they squeeze out, the more they risk appearing as if they “make money from piracy,” which is exactly how you get the MPAA’s attention.
TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Remote access via their servers.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I admit I’m very out of the loop, but my understanding is that remote access via their servers is the only supported remote viewing solution? Anything else is a “hack” so to speak.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 week ago
If you have a static IP, or dynamic DNS set up, you can set up your own remote access with a reverse proxy like nginx. The nice thing is I get to use my own SSL certificate and all the actual streaming goes directly to my server, not through their proxies.
The only “hacky” part about it is that the Admin dashboard shows “Not available outside your network”, even though everything works perfectly.
TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Everything else is “a hack” in the sense that it is literally just the way to get Jellyfin working outside your network too.
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s really not. They handle authentication but then everything is sent to your server.
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Dynamic DNS does cost money. But not $8 a month. Development also costs money which falls under the $8 a month, but really not my problem, which is why I use Jellyfin. I used to run Plex off of my Nvidia shield, which was a cool gateway drug to self hosting and I’m grateful to them for that, but I like handling the technical stuff myself.
almost1337@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I wish more people understood this perspective