This is virtually akin to banning AWS or DO. Hetzner are a legitimate and widely used cloud platform.
This is akin to Google blocking Verizon because of some spam calls. A ridiculous premise that shows huge immaturity on Plex’s part.
Plex Will Block Media Servers at Abuse Prevalent Hosting Company
Submitted 1 year ago by Vent@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://torrentfreak.com/plex-will-block-media-servers-at-prevalent-hosting-company-230915/
Comments
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 1 year ago
turkalino@lemmy.yachts 1 year ago
Nah, actually we as the plex community need to pull our heads out of our asses and remember that the internet was doing just fine before cloud service providers came along.
If you’re not self-hosting, it’s not your server.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That… has nothing to do with this? Plex (ignoring the plex pass streaming stuff) mostly just provides a library lookup feature and a solid-ish app and web interface to access your self hosted media.
In this case, the problem is that people are hosting their media libraries in The Cloud. Not because of The Convenience but so that they can instance them and sell access to said media libraries to pay off the hosting fees and turn a profit.
The number of people who are innocently hosting their media library in The Cloud are a fraction of a percent. And most are getting gouged massively on the cost of storage and bandwidth.
Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 1 year ago
“Never trust a machine you can’t throw out a window.” - Steve Wozniak
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Pirates will move to self hosted if they can still turn a profit, which they can.
Self hosting is easy and convenient and doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge. Plex are literally harming their own business model by driving away non-technical users with a sledgehammer solution that no one likes.
ares35@kbin.social 1 year ago
"a large number of Plex users use the software in violation of its Terms of Service (section "Content and Acceptable Use", bullet items 1 and/or 6), therefore all users will henceforth be banned from using Plex."
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I suspect Plex have a bunch of scary letters from expensive lawyers sat in their office, and this is what they need to do to make them go away.
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Feels like plex are heading towards removing sharing media altogether. I wouldn’t use it if they removed that functionality.
ripcord@kbin.social 1 year ago
Same.
I've been pretty happy with Emby as my backup plan.
thantik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Jellyfin is Emby minus the cost. Literally a fork of Emby that has far surpassed it at this point.
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 1 year ago
Okay so serious question here.
Why does Plex get to make this decision?
I don’t use Plex. But if they CAN do this, it seems to me there must be some unnecessary cloud dependence in Plex.
A good media server IMHO does not need a cloud connection, it should just work on your local network.
waitmarks@lemmy.world 1 year ago
yes, they have a centralized login system. It’s my biggest issue with plex and why i am experimenting with switching to jellyfin.
Atropos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ve been running Jellyfin since around it’s inception - highly recommend! Not quite as feature heavy as Plex yet, but an excellent community.
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 1 year ago
And that really bugs.
I keep all my media sorted in folders (old school I know). I went to try Plex once a few years back. It launched right into making an account and setting up remote access. Never was clear what if any access Plex mothership has to my media library- does that include filenames, file contents, everything? Sorry but do not want. I VPN back home, don’t need the cloud BS.
Kuvwert@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Glad I self host all my media
thorbot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Same. With Plex 😅
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 1 year ago
While I can totally sympathize with a company needing to take measures to curtail piracy and appease property owners, this is like burning down a house to put our a candle.
I personally self host so this won’t be a problem for me, but they’re gonna hit a lot of people who hosted at this domain, that weren’t participating in illegal activities.
I guess Plex must have saw it as prevalent enough to warrant a total ban, it was either really bad, or they’re being overzealous.
Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
To be frank, how do you even use Plex without pirating? Ripping your own DVDs and Blurays? And if so, isn’t that sort of considered piracy by the powers that be?
Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Yes, and no. In theory, you could absolutely “back up” any physical media you have to prevent wear and tear to the disc, which is a completely legitimate use case. And it’s not considered piracy because by buying that media, you purchased the legal rights to use it for personal viewing. However, if you ever gave a copy of that rip to another person (or gave that disc away to someone else without deleting your rips), you would be commiting piracy.
In fact, I believe that even viewing the media alongside another person is technically not allowed, although clearly that’s not enforced unless you’re doing some sort of public showing.
Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I have a mix. Ripping your own is in line with format shifting. Putting a cad into a cassette for use in your car that didn’t have a cd player is the old school equivalent. I believe it is a valid fair use case.
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
There is free content on Plex now. You could never pirate a single movie and still have content.
alianne@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I use it for my own dvds/blu-rays, yeah. This is technically still considered piracy, but my personal view is that I’m fine paying for something once because the people who made it deserve to get paid, but I’m not fine paying for the same thing multiple times when the effort on their end to make the new version was basically zero. It would be one thing if there were physical costs like going from vhs to dvd, but that’s not the case here.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Eh. I think this is going to be comparable to netflix blocking account sharing. People lose their minds but… the people being impacted aren’t paying customers.
Plex has increasingly gotten a reputation as “the thing you use to pirate movies”. Was on a date not too long ago where the topic of media libraries came up and I had to explain that my “plex server” is mostly just how I watch my blu rays and not something from “the pirate bay”. If most of the major public/paid shares have to switch to jellyfin or whatever? That is a win for corporate plex.
The alternative is to greatly restrict streaming quality as a client without Plex Pass. Which would suck but… yeah
And, as they increase the focus on providing their own media streaming service as well, this likely has opened them up to a LOT of calls from the studios regarding “So… why is our movie on five hundred pirate plex sites?”
quantum_mechanic@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Good. There are people out there who ruin all the nice things. Just host your own damn server and download your own content like a normal person.
Anon819450514@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
The fine Line of piracy is don’t make money out of it. That’s my hard line
ruckblack@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yep. That’s my line too. The folks running paid servers are ruining it for the rest of us.
quantum_mechanic@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Exactly. Though usually once somebody does, that’s when the authorities get involved.
JasSmith@kbin.social 1 year ago
Some people are quite shameless about selling Plex access, but playing hosting whack-a-mole is a losing game.
daniskarma@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Why use plex when jellyfin exist?
I’m more than happy with my jellyfin server knowing nobody can block it against my will.
ayaya@lemdro.id 1 year ago
This is the year of the Jellyfin desktop
micka190@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Year of the enshitification, more like.
It feels like every company just decided 2023 was the year they finally pulled the trigger and tried to cash-out and bail.
thantik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
With Plex adding “Live TV” and all the other shit for the past 6 years, their enshittification isn’t new. Most people I know still on Plex are only doing so because they paid for a lifetime pass. They’re full on sunk-cost-fallacy.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Remember how everyone lost their mind over Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year?
That was largely symptomatic of venture capital increasingly pulling out of tech. Partially because of the ongoing “are we in a recession or are we just acting like it?” mess. Partially because signs are good that we are going to have another Pandemic and are likely to handle it even more poorly. And partially because it has increasingly been clear that one company trying to pivot to become profitable means another startup takes their place.
And that means that a lot of the tech companies that have been operating at a loss for years/decades need to get their shit together.
Some of it is just frantic attempts to stem the bleeding resulting in bad will that will likely blow over (Reddit a few months ago… and twitter every week at this point). Some of it is a focused effort to start horrible so that the “compromise” is still favorable (MAYBE Unity?).
But expect more of this. Because it is largely the difference between existing and going bankrupt within the next year or two.
pdxfed@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Tech has always been geared towards losing money to provide a valuable service but the understanding from investors who don’t loan for free is that at some point you turn on the profit engine. Some tech companies are able to generate revenue without necessarily making their product awful for users, but the more pull and pressure investors have, and the more driven by impatience, the emshittifier things become. The Fed turning off the free money tap last year by starting to raise interest rates was an inevitable wake up call for investors that they needed to change their model to start profiting or at least lose less. Many, many companies, users and products are experiencing US’s investors-first-and-only capitalism’s inevitable end; it destroys the good it created. Companies either enshittify, or if they don’t have a way to enshittify, go under.
roguetrick@kbin.social 1 year ago
Interest rates. No free money.
sirboozebum@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Interest rates went up and the flood of money from investors went down.
Investors are probably demanding a return on their massive amounts of speculative investing in the tech industry.
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 1 year ago
There seems to be a pattern in services like this where they launch as a good idea that’s under priced and take off like a rocket, then growth levels off as everyone is either already using the service or never will regardless of what they do. Once you reach that point, however, you still need to show revenue growth because capitalism, so if you can’t get more users you either have to make the service more expensive for the users you have, or cheaper to run. The former we see happening all over the place, and the latter is actually a good thing in limited amounts as unnecessary parts are trimmed off, but will almost always also result in useful features being axed. Hence why everything seems to be getting more expensive and worse.
ultratiem@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
It’s great. Clean, minimal. Love it. Plex is like a titanic. Way too much heft for me. It’s also corporate, so hard pass
mrsgamedev@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ve got gigs of music and rip all my Blu-rays. Jellyfin was a shock! Runs so much smoother, streaming faster. I had no idea streaming over my network can be effectively lag free. It’s also nice having a choice of players, some work better for Android Auto, some better on my Windows desktop etc.
GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I would love to switch but there’s two things stopping me: Less support (if any?) for multi-users and remote access, and less app support especially when transcoding is needed. Also would be nice to not lose Overseerr when switching, I’m sure there’s a fork of that though.
TurnItOff_OnAgain@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I would be on Jellyfin now if they had a good Xbox app.
SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo 1 year ago
Lack of an official tvOS app and Plex being easy to set up for my family keeps me from switching.