Plex to block all servers hosted at Hetzner
links.plex.tv
links.plex.tv
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.
Jellyfin is good aslong as the content is not HDR and needs subtitles.... Also the chromecast support is very non-wife friendly
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.
Works on Android devices like the shield or libreelec on something like a pi.
Those native Android apps, be it jellyfin or plex dont handle subtitles wel, be it .srt or .ass
I've used clients on all classes of Apple devices, LG WebOS and browser. They're all quite problematic.
I still run it alongside Plex and give it a go every month or so but the same or new problems always arise.
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?
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.leetzone.a...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
You can also try jellyfin-mpv-shim (headless target player, stellar codec coverage because mpv) and/or "casting" from Jellyfin Android or Web.
If your only media library is going to be Jellyfin, I'm not sure Kodi is worth it unless you have a preference for its UI/UX.
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.
What would Plex gain from collecting information about user content ?
Is Plex capable of collecting user content information if requested by authorities ?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.plex.tv/en-gb/about/privacy-legal/
Plex collects the following information:
- Personal Data
- Individually identifiable
- Usage stats (what, when, where)
- Debug info (logs, metadata, devices, media)
- Device info
- Opt in info through the software
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plex Media Server
- Config data (may include IP address and the name of a Plex Media Server)
- Application info (unique application ID)
- Debug info
- Usage info
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plex does not collect
- Content titles (of personal content) EXCEPT for debugging
- Metadata (of perosnal content) EXECEPT content syncing, metadata matching (anonymous) or third parties.
- Data through Plex relay service EXECEPT for buffering (but is end to end encrypted)
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
Discussion on Plex Forum: https://forums.plex.tv/t/not-allowed-to-use-hetzner/853570
Discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/16iqwf4/anyone_else_g...
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.
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.
To be fair, it's not exactly the same as Plex. But it covers many of my use cases;
- Organizes your media on the fly
- Does not do useless transcoding (it was a huge issue back in ~ 2016 for Plex).
- Can directly connect to SMB shares, my Synology NAS.
- Does not require anything running on the server, so it does not matter your NAS has a decade old MIPS CPU.
- List files from multiple cloud providers.
- Can also sync with Trakt if you want to keep track of what you watch.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Xsteve, tvheadend and stream River are options
I thought the reason was obvious (it's the first word of first sentence of the parent comment)
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?
1) The UI is trash, bloated and unreliable.
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 :)
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.
None of that makes it garbage.
I disagree with your disagreement.
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.
Perhaps I'm an outlier but I've never had a good experience with Jellyfin. It seems that anything and everything that could go wrong does.
The Jellyfin codebase also terrifies me. I would not feel comfortable hosting a publicly-accessible instance of Jellyfin.
Ok, why?
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.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/security/advisories/GHS...
I suspect they'd prefer to pass the hot potato to Hetzner but their lawyers told them otherwise.
Honesty, I think Plex is a honeypot and is going to be used to start massive legal suites against people.
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.
This would explain why only some hosters are affected and not others.
Advertising, and operating their own streaming service, presumably involves business partnerships with entities that may not look fondly on self-hosting?
They’re doing it as part of a charm offensive to partner with content creators.
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 bloated garbage compared to Emby and Jellyfin.
Just set the IP address/netmask and that’s it.
This is at the server level.
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.
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
From what I've gathered about Hetzner for the last 20 years, they take down illegal content when the law is involved.
Hetzner is also one of, if not THE, biggest provider in Europe - of course they will have abusing users.
The problem is problematic behavior of individuals. Blaming the hardware, Plex, or the sky is quixotically misguided.
Abusers are smart enough to design their architecture to avoid vendor lock-in, so they head to whoever provides cheapest traffic.
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.
What does it mean for a provider to be pirate-friendly? Not to act on takedown requests?
They forward them to the customer and ask you to deal with it.
If you dont, you will be fired as customer.
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.
[1] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/blob/94304819263b0553...
For a simple, low-stakes personal website, Hetzner is probably hard to beat on price.
Then get more understanding why this happening and then send the details to the support.
I may explore OVH in the future, nothing against them at all.
That is just a direct consequence of their popularity while being among the cheapest of the big popular ones.
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"
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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.
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!
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.
The server is a joke, most of the “functionality” is half/baked or outright broken.
The “native” clients are laughably bad. Most of them cannot pass-through audio to receivers reliably.
I really want Jellyfin to succeed, but it’s an incredibly long way from replacing the long-time dumpster fire that is Plex.
(Context: I was a Plex user and self-hoster for about 7 years, and switched to self-hosted Jellyfin about 2 years ago.)
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.