I tried one of their legit movies once. It was super blurry and interrupted every 10 minutes by ads. It was ridiculous. I got the impression it exists as a scapegoat only.
Tumblr definitely had (has?) cornered niche blogging too though I think? Especially photo-heavy content, as a Wordpress alternative for a personal blog not a 'website'? I think anyway, honestly didn't realise it was significantly used for porn.
OnlyFans on the other hand... didn't they recently say something (trying to appease payment provider I think) about being a general purpose fan payment/follower thing (like Patreon) not just porn? Sure.. it just so happens that the latter category 'rounds to 100' as you say, but yes, general purpose and theory and even intent perhaps!
Oh that's undoubtedly a lot, of course. If Plex somehow prevented (built-in CV detection of anything commercial vs. home video being played from your own library, say) pirated content I think MAU would drop approximately 100% though!
Ripping a DVD collection to which I own the originals is not piracy in my country.
In fact, we pay a tax by the GB for every writable storage medium we purchase (everything, from HDDs to the SD card I load into my camera, including actual phones) that goes to authors and accounts for “private copies” like those.
I use Plex and the RAWs from my camera take a lot more of my media server's HDD than any DVD rips.
I sympathise and think that should be legal in any country (I've long thought that the sale should be of 'the right to view' more than the physical medium, Sony and others toyed with it for BluRay which I was thrilled aboutthe potential future of, but canned it recently-ish) but I don't think that materially affects my hypothetical, for one thing it could trivially be applied only to other regions.
Serious question: do you think the majority of people aren't getting themselves off (or working their way to getting themselves off in short order) when consuming nudes, erotica and nsfw? The follow up question would then be if the majority of people are using the art to get themselves off is said art not then porn?
> Got it. So they want to show the lawyers that they’re doing something to “combat piracy” even though they know it will do absolutely nothing and result in a bunch of pissed off legitimate customers.
What would be a better solution, legitimately? Plex is ripe for lawsuits from media giants in every corner of the world, so even if their software isn’t illegal, they’re always going to have a target on their back and enough lawsuits will bankrupt them anyways.
Incorporate in a country where companies/people cannot bring frivolous lawsuits? Seriously, it's pretty well established at this point that providing a video streaming service product is not illegal. Plex is not the one providing the content.
Sure, but YouTube created the Content ID system in a settlement with Viacom in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y.... . Maybe the ruling would've been different if they appealed it to the supreme court, but that could've been a worse situation for everyone (e.g. because Google had to create Content ID, any sufficiently big service must also create a Content ID-esque system).
What is a lot? 50% of all videos? 10%? 1%? 0.001%? Compare the share of copyright violations on YouTube vs Plex and it will be apparent what each service is really used for.
I just looked for three movies off the top of my head, 'xyz full movie' filtered for > 20 minutes
Every one of them was available on the first page of results!
Non-exhaustive, sure, but plenty of people use YouTube for piracy
Not really here to beat a horse, I think we're way off course. This is probably not that bad of a move, Hetzner auction servers are a major piracy hive.
And YT is actively removing pirated content. I am not saying this move by plex is the same thing, but at least it looks like they are doing something about piracy.
I waited way longer than I should have to migrate. In many cases you don't even need to change anything, just mount your media into jellyfin and it will read everything. Give it time to build out a cache of course. I've been way, way happier with Jellyfin than I was with Plex.
I tried it and went back to plex. It's not bad but lacks polish in its client apps. It's a good effort but plex is still ahead, I have in mind to revisit it though cause I don't feel like plex will stick around for much longer.
Pretty good in my experience. It takes about 10 seconds to start up but once it's warm it's snappy. It ran easily on my pi (without on the fly transcoding of course), although I did move it to a desktop so I could use runtime transcoding because I have a couple clients that don't support all the codecs.
I just tried it as well, thanks! I like it a lot, though I disabled transcoding (all my clients seem OK with the codecs and I just don't like it). I'm switching over to it now!
When I used to use Plex and it started getting shutdown the hosts always switched to Emby. I have had far more success with Kodi though since the last like 4 years. The real plex alternative to me would be IPTV services that all seem to use Xcodes and have huge VOD libraries. But Kodi + Debrid Services has been great.
But plex also feature wise is mostly stuck with 2008 kodi/xbmc when it forked for my use case.
Kodi needs headless to compete with plex. But that is slow going as no one really is really working on it full time. They even added in a couple of years ago the emulation bits again from the original XBMC.
What is the streaming bit you are referring to specifically? I guess like from instance to instance of your own library? You can use Plex as a backend and Kodi as a frontend.
So they added a new plugin? cool. The XBMC system is pretty flexible with its plugins. Does it use a library for it to know the movie you are watching and the amount of time to skip? Or is it just a fixed time skip?
Analyses videos in your library based on audio. For example if there are two or more episodes of a season in your library, checks for the same audio match within the first 20 minutes of the episode between episodes and marks their timestamps. While watching an episode it gives you the Skip Intro button similar to Netflix/Apple TV etc.
Somewhat in a similar way the skip end credits works (for example allows you to skip credits in Marvel movies to post / mid credit scenes)
Determine the type of behavior that likely indicates a server is shared with many different people, which should be extremely easy, then send that user a series of warnings culminating in banning their Plex account if they don't comply, with a transparent easy appeals process in case they get it wrong.
Alternatively: don't have Plex accounts in the first place. Distribute the software in such a way that it can be deployed silently and independently of any connection to the company that creates it. (In ancient times, this was actually the normal way of distributing software - you went to the store and bought a CD with a program on it, and then you could run that program on your hardware without ever interacting with the company that made it.)
I've given this a legitimate shot two times, both self-hosting and via a professional host and both times on I have massive streaming problems on a 1 gig connection.
It, on paper, has competitive features to Plex but Plex streams almost as reliably as Netflix does.
I self-host Jellyfin on an old HP ProDesk PC that came from an office selling unneeded equipment. It's connected to my consumer wifi router/switch switch via Ethernet, and I stream videos on my TV via the Jellyfin client on a Roku Stick (which itself is connected to my network via wifi). Jellyfin streams great on my setup.
I know that's not very helpful in improving performance in your specific situation, but I just wanted to add my anecdata that Jellyfin doesn't require beefy hardware or above-average networking to run well. Sorry that I don't have much insight as to what was causing the performance issues in your setup.
I have a lifetime Plex Pass, but I switched to Jellyfin years ago and never looked back. Well, I did switch to iOS at some point and the best app for it at the time was still in Testflight, but the ecosystem is a lot better now.
For those complaining about Jellyfin's performance, which I've not encountered, you should remember that hardware transcoding in Plex is paywalled.
(Made the initial switch after they added their streaming services to the dashboard, amongst other corporate decisions I don't want in a media server I host myself)
I have Intel NUC (i7 8559U) for Jellyfin server and 1gig connection. No shuttering issue in my home network, it run flawless in HTML5 Player, Jellyfin's ExoPlayer and MX Player Pro.
Likely the issue is the transcoding process, you would need look into that. It could be the CPU is not transcoding quickly enough, I/O bandwidth issue (CPU to hard drive or vice versa), QuickSync are not enabled in Intel CPU. Newer video codecs (HEVC/AV1), audio codecs, 10-bit, higher resolutions are a big factor in transcoding.
I run it on my laptop, and when I want to watch a new episode of a TV show, or a movie, I search for it on 1337x.to, find the mp4 with the most seeders, copy the magnet link, paste it into Transmission and then press enter. Within half an hour, the file is in the folder where Jellyfin knows to look for it. Then I open Jellyfin on my phone and watch the content in bed.
This works for me because I've never cared about hoarding a library of TV shows and movies that I've already seen. I just download what I want when I want it.
So instead of me having to go to find the magnet, and paste it in, this application monitors my shows, and when a new episode pops up, it picks up a release based on my criteria (quality, language, etc), sends it to qBittorrent, waits for the download, and puts it in a folder.
Radarr for movies, Bazarr for subs, Sonarr (mentioned above) for shows, and Prowlarr for search indexing.
Yeah, I've heard of it and it looks great. But it also means I need to maintain a media server (which costs me time and money, and is also a potential liability in terms of copyright mafia and script kiddies who find a vulnerability in it and end up on my network). One day I'll get around to building a proper setup, with automated deploys, isolated networking and secure hosting... but for now the least work is just downloading files one at a time when I need them, and otherwise just watching Netflix.
Frankly the motivation that will finally make me build this is that my mom is complaining about the streaming service fragmentation... each of her favorite shows is on a different service with its own $20/month subscription, and that's on top of the $100/month for cable. For now she's just password sharing, but when that stops working I'll get around to setting this up for her so I can manage it remotely. Or maybe by then the services will figure out they'd be better off just streaming everything free on the internet and splicing ads into the streams. You know, like TV...
No so. You could run it on your laptop just like you do with your other process. Sonarr would simply automate what you have been doing manually. No media server necessary.
I use stremio on phone or table when I need to relax, mainly since I have a thing with checking old videos from archive.org but you can actually use it for torrents as well.
I run Jellyfin on my home server, and this has been a problem for me as well. Even within my home network I'll have occasional stuttering while watching movies, despite the fact that I'm using a dedicated server with 128gb of RAM and 12 CPUs, with a 10 gigabit network card in a 10 gigabit switch, and I'll still get stuttering.
I've debated moving to Plex but I'm broadly against running proprietary software on a server (for reasons I cannot honestly articulate terribly well).
During transcoding, but I'm having a hell of a time disabling that. I've looked around for a configuration to just broadly disable transcoding, since pretty much everything I use to play JellyFin is libavcodec or ffmpeg based anyway and can happily decode stuff client side.
It depends on the client's (the one you are streaming to) range of codec support. If you are streaming to the TV that your TV don't have specific codecs that it can decode, then it will transcode to the TV specification. If the file is in AVC (2.654) but the audio codec is not supported by the TV, then Jellyfin will transcode it. If you are watching the stream via the browser (HTML5 player), it have a limited range of codec it can support hence the transcoding. If your source file are in HEVC/AV1, browsers don't have a way to decode it. Jellyfin's ExoPlayer also don't a way to decode HEVC/AV1 and limited range of audio codecs.
If you want DirectPlay, then it best to use the external player for it. You have to set it up in the setting in Jellyfin to use the external player. For Android, Jellyfin can DirectPlay to MX Player Pro. I use Jellyfin in my Android tablet and set MX Player Pro as external player, it works flawless without shuttering.
Also I learn that it is best to enable QuickSync if you have Intel. With QS, it can transcode effectively this way.
Edit I saw your reply to other commenter. Browsers ("web-native") does not support MKV, unfortunately. If you want to run it in the browser without transcoding, the file need to be in MP4.
Use the Desktop app or mobile app. Chrome/edge don't support the codecs needed, and jellyfin transcodes. The desktop app is chromium, but with the right video codecs enabled, on it. It's pretty nice.
I'm not certain, but I think it will avoid transcoding for certain "Web-native" formats that your client device can already play. For example, if you download an mp4 then you should be able to watch it on your iPhone without Jellyfin needing to transcode it.
Every file on my server is a raw blu-ray rip using an MKV container. I don't compress or transcode anything myself, everything is a raw rip from MakeMKV. I suppose I could write an ffmpeg batch job to convert them to MP4 if I wanted, but MKV is really convenient since it'll keep all the subtitle and multiple audio tracks within the file instead of a bunch of SRT files floating around.
Also, while a majority of blu-rays are h264, a non-zero number are encoded with VC-1 or Mpeg2, which as far as I'm aware are definitely not "web-native".
I really wish there was just a checkbox that I could click, or a setting in a config file I could change, that would just avoid transcoding and just send the file.
Apparently the overarching goal of Jellyfin is to always be able to "direct play" (no transcoding), but whether or not that's possible depends on each file and the client device. They have a comprehensive table of which formats require transcoding on which devices: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/
Apple TV 4K (129 USD) + Infuse (10 USD/yr) is the perfect player for me. The only con is that it does not support anything atmos other than Dolby Digital Plus, but my setup is 5.1 only, so I don't mind.
Honestly, that sounds quite weird to me. I've been remotely running my instance with only 100Mb/s connection and it hasn't even struggled running 4K film. All this on a budget i3 9100. And I'm quite sure it should be able to run on even slower hardware if need be.
I misused the word "dedicated"; the server is actually used for lots of stuff. What I meant is that I didn't repurpose an old desktop or anything, it's an actual rack mounted server.
I run NixOS on there with a bunch of different services, though the only thing that comes anywhere near mattering resource-wise is JellyFin when it's transcoding.
A setup that I can now heartily recommend (after using it for 6 months) is Apple TV 4k and the Infuse media app[0]
It's able to find your movies and series on Samba shares (and probably other types of locations, too) and categorize, find subtitles, adjust audio and so on.
This assumes you've already got your media somewhere of course (like a file server on your LAN), but I bet 99% of the HN crowd has a home server anyway. And if you use torrents, you can dump the media there.
+1 for the Apple TV mention. I gave up and ordered one to use Infuse, might try out Swiftfin first though, for my Jellyfin setup. It’s always trade offs with the official Jellyfin clients, can’t get everything working 100% of the time with the same setup. I have an Android TV and keep having to switch between LibVLC and ExoPlayer depending on what I’m watching, not to mention the numerous bugs and clunkiness. Like for some reason I can’t wrap my head around, ExoPlayer Jellyfin can’t play ASS and has to transcode the whole file while ExoPlayer Plex can. When you seek before waiting for a previous seek to finish and start playing you end up with a broken stream where the local progress bar and time doesn’t correspond to what’s actually shown on screen. After trying Infuse on my phone, it seems exactly the kind of “just works” I’m looking for.
If you're pirating content, you should retain complete control and security over your setup. How does Infuse enforce its yearly license cost? There must be some telemetry at the very least, which is exactly the issue that got Plex into this situation and why people would do well to avoid it (unless of course you're just watching your own legal copies of media).
It's apple only (tvos, ios, and macos). The yearly subscription is for enabling formats and resolutions, I believe. They don't have a server part. They just scan your sources (smb shares, cloud drives, plex, jellyfin, emby,...) and present a library. My setup is Jellyfin (old Mac Mini with ubuntu server) + Infuse on Apple TV as the player.
Used this with my Roku to stream movies locally, and it worked OK for the most part, but on more than one occasion it had a hard time with larger video files, often causing audio sync issues, weird freezing, or subtitle failures. I tried both the Jellyfin app and the Emby app on Roku with similar results; not sure if it's Jellyfin or the Roku app.
I've since switched back to Plex which streams flawlessly on my local area network.
I tried Jellyfin vs Plex, I forget why, but it’s like how I wound up buying a Subaru because on paper it looked like it checked all the boxes. It does technically check all the boxes but it’s still unpleasant to drive in a myriad of little ways, just like Jellyfin. Checking boxes doesn’t add up to a pleasant user experience.
As far as UI/UX is concerned their tvOS app is in a really rough shape. The web UI has a fairly reasonable program guide (edit: for Live TV), while the app doesn't. Also navigation in the app doesn't feel polished at all unfortunately.
I think the Apps are inconsistent, some of the newer Apple ones are great, the computer ones are first tier, but some of the multiple TV OSes are lagging.
I wish there was an open hardware option that was a target for devs to support for projects like Jellyfin but also funded them when you bought it.
eh, I am not using it for piracy; I just like the convenience of streaming services. So my plex library is all blurays, DVDs and a handful of VHS’s that have been digitally encoded.
However, availability of bluray for new titles seems to be waning. so I can imagine many who use plex like I do will turn to piracy soon.
I’m weird though and prefer to own my stuff, I hate renting and especially I hate services which rent an entire library at once and lock it out completely without me paying arbitrarily. Feels like they are landlords of media, instead of constructors.
If we’re being pedantic though - in the US, streaming blu-rays and DVDs is also violating the DMCA, because presumably there was a step involved by the operator to bypass the encryption on the disk.
Other than family home videos, it’s pretty hard to find a 100% “legal” source of content for Plex.
I have too and I 100% agree that there is a strong non-piracy use-case for Plex. However if you browse the reddit r/Plex sub it's shocking the percent of people not only using it for piracy but also working to build their own user bases - I can't tell if they receive payment or not. I've seen many posts with people lamenting the behaviors of their end users, numerous with people asking for recommendations on request systems (where end users can request content) and even a few - I kid you not - complaining that they invited random people to use their Plex server but did not receive a response or were treated poorly when the end user (that term again) used it. All that is to say...I think many people are mis-using Plex
It is more complicated than that. It is both legal AND illegal in the US:
> Under United States federal law, making a backup copy of a DVD-Video or an audio CD by a consumer is legal under fair use protection. However, this provision of United States law conflicts with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibition of so-called "circumvention measures" of copy protections.
.
> In the 2004 "321" case, Federal District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California, ruled that the backup copies made with software such as DVD Decrypter are legal but that distribution of the software used to make them is illegal.
Further problem though:
> In 2010, the Librarian of Congress instituted a DMCA exemption which protects circumvention of CSS protection under certain circumstances. This exemption expired in 2013.
Therefore, it seems to be a "case by case" basis type situation currently.
Thanks for the added details, I wasn't aware of the 2004 case. Its all sort of messed up, and ridiculous for someone actually trying to follow the law.
Yeah but not whole libraries. At least not here in Europe. Not sure about US. But here sharing a movie is only allowed if you watch it together at home.
I'd love to have a modern interface to my collection of legally acquired DVDs and BluRays and so on. It's pretty absurd that such a thing doesn't exist already. This isn't meaningfully "piracy" despite whatever the DMCA (and other laws our masters at the MPAA may have handed down to us) may say.
I have already moved my plex to a home server prior to this, but this anti-consumer bs is just enough of a final push to move over towards the better alternatives.
What's causing headaches are shared accounts. If plex disabled that feature they'd get rid of people who sell shares on plex instances or maybe just limit the number of shares per server. There is no legitimate use case of a plex server used by 20 accounts. Media companies go after pirates who sell pirated content before caring about users who pirate for themselves who may as well have legitimate content on their servers.
What is Plex, can someone explain what it is and how it works? I tried to figure it out from their website but didn't find much information on those topics. I don't have an account there, didn't have to sign in, just clicked on free movies and was able to stream a great movie in my browser entirely for free. Like, what?
It is a personal media management application that has sprawled into offering streaming plugins. Thats it really. If you dont mind wrangling your metadata, it is a pretty fantastic way to stream your personal music or movie library.
it sucks because Jellyfin really should be replacing Plex, but they just don't have the client experience ready to go yet. The Samsung TV client has been languishing in a github repo for years, the Android client is quite crashy and difficult, and the web interface leaves much to be desired as well. But a couple of ex Plex employees fixing it up and we could be done with this silly Plex stuff.
"these pirates, who constitute a percentage of our business that rounds to 100, are really getting in the way of our business"