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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

> 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.

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> What would be a better solution, legitimately?

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.

A company can be the target of lawsuits regardless of where they are incorporated. Or otherwise they can get their domains blocked or seized.

Can you name any specific countries that meet the requirement? (honest question)

I've been told Thailand is suitable

It's like you're making YouTube responsible for any leaked movies? It's always the user who does it. Plex is just a platform.

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).

How many pirated movies do you see on YouTube? The platform very actively blocks such content.

A lot, actually. Typically they just speed it up a bit to bypass content ID.

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.

Are there any new efforts to build an open source plex alternative? I know about Kodi, but it has its own glaring issues.

Perfectly set up the plug for Jellyfin!

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.

How is it for CPU usage/general snappiness? Maybe I should bite the bullet too.

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!

Jellyfin?

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.

plex has one thing over kodi. the streaming bit.

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.

that is correct

Plex recently added skip intro and skip credits features. They add new features from time to time.

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)

Seems like Emby and Jellyfin are the two most common alternatives.

Jellyfin

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.)

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