Plex Users Fear New Feature Will Leak Porn Habits to Their Friends and Family | Hacker News Reader

Plex Users Fear New Feature Will Leak Porn Habits to Their Friends and Family

404media.co

92 pointsrbanffy105 comments

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There's been a steady stream of garbage "features" from Plex for a while and this is just the latest. Maybe the lifetime Plex Pass was a mistake but I bought it years ago and haven't wanted or used a single feature they've released since. A lot of folks using my server weren't stoked to get the email. I keep an eye on alternatives for when they finally push it too far. I'll bet that's going to be something like pinning one of these freebie streaming services to the top of my home screen and not letting me get rid of it. Or probably just some forced advertising somewhere.

Always go free and open source like Jellyfin for any long term personal consumption. Anything else can be changed and you would have to change your long term habits.

Back when I started using Plex the open source alternative was only XBMC. Plex just had the killer feature of being able to transcode correctly. But yes I agree, being a for profit closed source app has just been a pile of junk beyond the core feature set that was put out long ago.

I also have Plex Lifetime and was fed up with something or another and switching to Jellyfin was pretty nice and straightforward. I'd recommend as well if you have a free afternoon/weekend.

Skip intro and credits features that were added last year were actually good.

Totally agree. At least the base functionality is solid. Doing nothing would have been better.

Yikes, just use jellyfin. I find it far superior in just about everything.

Very glad I made the move as well. Fun to watch them dismantle it from the curb though.

Is it? I've honestly been looking for alternatives lately, I've been a plex user for a decade but it feels like it gets worse every time they drop an update. Examples:

- I do not need or want a Recommendation tab for my own media library, and there's no way to remove it

- The web player is straight up broken on MacOS

- The Apple TV app is slow and sometimes doesn't play sound

- Demanding a registered account when you only use the app/server locally and it's absolutely not required, and wasn't always.

The main usage for me is via Apple TV and I see there's a SwiftFin app available, which sounds about right? Would you recommend Jellyfin to me?

I switched from Plex to jellyfin because the Plex Android TV app couldn't play 4K video, while VLC and jellyfin could do so reliably on the same device. All transcoding was disabled, so I know it was a client issue.

Jellyfish may not have some nicer finishes such as trailer fetching or better correlation of collections, but it's a reliable navigator of my media library.

I set up a Jellyfin instance on a surplus 1L PC a few months ago. It honestly works great. I use the Roku and Android apps. No reason to use Plex anymore.

I even set up a Raspberry Pi at my mother in law's house which exposed my Jellyfin instance on her LAN via Tailscale and an nginx reverse proxy, it works flawlessly.

> I do not need or want a Recommendation tab for my own media library, and there's no way to remove it

It's open source and recently called out for developers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37744114

Might be an easy change for someone on HN to add a toggle.

Oh I was talking about Plex, hopefully jellyfin doesn't add this, haha. Apologies for the confusion.

> The Apple TV app is slow and sometimes doesn't play sound. The main usage for me is via Apple TV…

You can try Infuse an an alternative client to Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin: https://firecore.com/infuse

You should try out the Infuse app. It’s a fantastic front end for jellyfin on Apple TV (and other Apple products)

It is a $1/month for some of the advanced encoding though

I wanted to try it but it seems there's no free usage on the Apple TV, at least for my HD and 4K library?

So in the course of trying Infuse I had to link it to Plex, which to do that they direct you to plex.tv/link (which to reaffirm what I said in my initial comment, this just shouldn't be needed, why can't I just add my plex server details in the app but that's not Infuse's fault) so I go to plex.tv/link and the form breaks immediately, with a box to input the code and a spinner saying it's checking the code I haven't entered, I enter the code and hit enter, I'm prompted to create an account, NOT sign in even though I was directed here by a link page which just strikes me as wrong, I have to click an extra thing to get a sign in form, which I do, then it takes me BACK to the link page, where I put in the code to the still broken form, hit enter, then it reloads the link page, now that's fixed at least, so I enter the code a THIRD TIME to accomplish this very straightforward fucking task, and it FINALLY links to my plex server.

And I only share this both to bitch my way to a small amount of catharsis and also this is such a handy encapsulation of the enshittification of plex I've witnessed over the many years I've used it. God fucking damn.

And to reaffirm: All the plex linking does is inform Infuse of my local server's settings which I could've just TYPED. THE FUCK. IN. With my iPhone. Sweet Baby Ray's.

These are problems you've been having with Plex?

I use it daily, and have no trouble with either the macOS web player (in Safari), nor the Apple TV app, in general.

That said, I do sometimes have trouble with certain media acting a bit squirrely when it tries to auto-convert them—in particular, one show we've been watching recently we had to start, then quickly scrub back to the beginning or it wouldn't play sound.

Then I re-encoded it manually using Handbrake and replaced the wonky copy with that, and it's been fine ever since. (And, of course, since I'm using a 2011 Mac mini to actually run Plex, there are some shows I have to preset to optimize or it won't be able to keep up with playback, but that's just the kind of thing one has to expect with this sort of setup.)

I set up a local streaming server for the first time about two months ago. I'd initially intended to use Plex because it's the option most people I know use. I was shocked when it prompted me to setup an account with a third-party (PlexCorp or whatever) during the install process. I did a quick web search about this concern, found Jellyfin and haven't looked back.

I've seen jellyfin come up a lot in these conversations. Curious to hear some opinions on my situation.

I've been doing the self-host Plex server thing since long before it was anything else (late aughts). I don't use it for anything else. While I'm all for switching to something else, my tolerance to level of effort is quite low so inertia has been the thing keeping me on Plex.

How quick & easy would it be to convert to something like jellyfin for self hosting?

Potential gotchas: in terms of tech stack I run the server on a Synology NAS so would need something that runs there. And 99% of my streaming is to Roku sticks, so there'd need to be an app there.

I can't speak to the skills/effort required from you, but those two particular gotchas are covered. It's a fairly common use case.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/synology/

https://channelstore.roku.com/details/cc5e559d08d9ec87c5f30d...

Don’t need to switch, run both. They both run on Synology due to Docker as well. Point them at the same share and you’re good to go.

jellyfin absolutely crawls compared to something like stashapp but its branded for certain content ;)

In my opinion if your use case is watching your small collection of your own tv shows and movies on your computers use jellyfin, for anything else use Plex.

I love and have used both and while Jellyfin is great at that one thing if you need good mobile support or Roku/Apple TV support or similar it just fails miserably. If you want to have a music or audiobook collection it does even worse.

My understanding is that the Jellyfin team is working hard on the clients story. But yes, right now, the story is a bit lacking. Note that there are third-party alternatives that can fill the gap such as Infuse on iOS/tvOS.

We all know the workarounds and bypasses and the "pay infuse so you don't pay plex". But come on, it's a tacit admission that plex is on a better position: which is all the op said.

Are you responding to the right comment? I simply stated that Jellyfin is working on improving client support, but it's not there yet.

And yes, some people prefer using Jellyfin and paying for Infuse over using Plex. Different strokes for different folks.

I use a native client or browser on every device I use for it?

For reasons like this, it seems that none of the current media library packages are really excellent across the board. They’ve all got significant weaknesses/downsides which is frustrating.

It makes me wonder how difficult/involved implementation of the API that clients like Infuse use to communicate with Plex, Kodi, Emby, etc is, as the aforementioned frustration makes it tempting to try writing a media server myself, and I expect that API be the most challenging part.

Yea I have about 20 friends and family who use my Plex server. So at the moment I dont think JellyFin is a good alternative. But I did put out a big PSA to everyone to turn that newsletter crap off.

Web interface works perfectly fine on mobile? To the point where I haven't bothered to see if there is a native app.

Kodi plugin works great too and easy enough with LibreElec or similar.

Not sure what "anything else" could be.

I use Infuse for Jellyfin on Apple TV and it works wonderfully.

In my experience infuse only technically worked on about half my library, the other half caused crashes and the UI is definitively not streamlined for the media server use case (it feels like I should just be using VLC on iOS via DLNA or something at that point)

It's small compared to the collected works of every streaming service on the Internet, but it won't suddenly and mysteriously get deleted when a streaming license contract expires, and with 18 TB drives on the market, it certainly doesn't seem small.

I use Jellyfin on Roku and Apple TV and the Jellyfin apps work just fine. Sometimes the Roku app loses its credentials, but they’re working on these issues and the apps keep getting better. Although I only use Jellyfin on a local network.

This is laughably false. JF has very bad matching, bad UI, no theme music (the third party plugin is awful) and any Plex feature equivalent is supplied by a random third party plugin that barely works. I spent 3 weeks trying to migrate to JF from Plex and I found it vastly inferior on every metric including playback where I had to play around with each client SEPARATELY just so it plays content.

This makes it out to be so much worse than it actually is.

It's good at what it does - serving media to all your devices. No online accounts, no phoning home, no advertisement, no BS. I've had no trouble with either the web UI or any of the apps available on android/TV. Admittedly I've never used Plex but I can't imagine it doing any of that much better.

It's not hard to miss what you don't know. But take intro skipping. Awesome feature. JF still doesn't have it. It's not necessary, but hard to give up. And frankly you shouldn't have to give it up. The swiftfin client still is missing features. Oauth is still a "won't support" feature. The devs abandoned and locked their subreddit in a fit of pique. There's a litany of reasons the project won't replace plex.

>no theme music

oooh BIG selling point for me.

It has it, the plugin works fine.

no you miss my point. I hate that feature. I may move to JF just so i dont get it :-P

Oh haha, I guess I did. I don't use Plex, but surely you can just turn it off in preferences somewhere?

Why not use both? I run both in LXCs, Plex has a little more hardware since its transcoded isn’t as good but I point them both at the same NFS share. Everybody happy.

Well, not the movie studios and music labels I guess.

I have Jellyfin setup alongside Plex, and the one thing that's keeping me from moving fully off Plex is Plexamp [1]. It works flawlessly on my phone/laptops, includes a ton of features and is a pleasure to use - especially compared to Spotify or Apple Music.

I am aware of FinAmp [2] and music players for Jellyfin, but they aren't comparable to PlexAmp yet.

1. https://www.plex.tv/plexamp/

2. https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp

I just use the jellyfin app for my music

Interesting. I found it to be compromised in almost every way, but it’s made substantial progress. Each time I try it I end up going back to Plex.

X2 for jellyfin. Run it in a container on my nas box.

I have to say, I don't really get what Plex is even doing these days. In fairness I don't know if they do, either: the bulk of their user base is centered around the playback of pirated content which isn't exactly the kind of money-spinning market anyone truly wants to be in.

It looks like they've been trying to "go legit" by offering free streaming options etc but the content is weak and they must have the stats showing that no-one uses it. So now they're promoting e-mail newsletters highlighting the pirated content people are watching? I just don't get it.

But I paid for a lifetime pass years ago and their DVR functionality works just about well enough for me, so I still run it. The inertia is strong.

This shows pretty clearly they’re indexing the content on everyone’s servers. I wonder if the MPAA, etc. could make the argument they’re inducing piracy by allowing it to happen. I also wonder if Plex could be forced to give up identity info on people that are suppliers via shared instances.

It shoulda been opt in but I love this feature tbh. I’ve been waiting for some kind of social features with plex. It would make my life much easier if I could write reviews for movies so my friends could see what I think rather than constantly asking me for recommendations.

I’m not convinced they are correct about the feature being opt out rather than opt in - I just checked on my server and I am opted out and this is the first I’m hearing of this feature.

Also is there some astroturfing from 404media going on? This is the third link I’ve seen from them today on HN and I’ve never heard of them

Edit: According to the roll out post they will prompt you to opt in when you log in to Plex after the roll out but you do have to opt in, it’s possible I just missed the prompt and others opted in without reading? It may have been different for beta users as well

https://www.plex.tv/blog/discover-together/

It was opt-out when it first rolled out. I cant speak to now. I had to opt out as soon as I got the original email. My friends did not and I made fun of them for their viewing choices. By that night, they all had theirs set to private.

Could be but I doubt, it, they're a pretty new company that was founded by a bunch of ex vice journos who cover the kinds of things HN finds interesting in a way that HN finds palatable.

I'm not sure but myself and all my server users got the email and I've never intentionally opted into anything related to this.

>Also is there some astroturfing from 404media going on? This is the third link I’ve seen from them today on HN and I’ve never heard of them

They're a relatively new tech site that are very aware of the value of astroturfing sites like HN and Reddit, so they're obviously doing it. They got a congratulatory "great work going indie" topic when they launched here because a lot of their staff worked on bigger sites, but I've been seeing more "Wow this site is actually terrible, exaggerating crap" comments than anything positive.

This article could've been written without the porn angle, but that's going to be the sensational headline.

I'm seeing (or perhaps just hoping for) a jump in people using Jellyfin and StashApp. I don't expect anything big, but something small. The same way it's only ever a small number of people that switch to Free and Libre software. A miniscule number that jump to GNU+Linux, that abandon Facebook, that cut the cord, that see the full breadth and width of externalities that come with car-first infrastructure.

Because the Libre solution will end up on top, the same way a millionaire goes broke: slowly at first, then all at once.

The sad thing about it is that it shows how people are not only willing to give up convenience for freedom, but will act like they have a fire lit under their asses to avoid facing public shame.

Giving up freedom for convenience often involves some form trust, which isn't unreasonable. You expect a service, you often pay for, to respect their users and to act in their users best interest - even if they have other interests as well.

This is clearly a betrayal of that trust and also gross misunderstanding of their target audience. Totally fine to be up in arms about that.

I am not sure if I get your point here? We still need to trust open source developers, and no project (free or proprietary) will be successfully adopted if it doesn't act with users' best interest in mind.

We do, but it requires a lot more for something like this to pass and take people by surprise. In jellyfin there is no central server and it works fine without internet access.

With Plex it was always implied that they could do something like this, just not why they would want to.

Not sure how "freedom" would protect you in any other sense?

> Not sure how "freedom" would protect you in any other sense?

There is nothing being said about being "protected".

I'm still not sure what your point here is. Maybe we are just talking past each other.

Look, some open source projects are great and some aren’t managed so well. It’s not heresy to pick and choose.

If you are willing to compromise on your freedom on anything, it just means that you are okay with being restricted as long as the cage is comfortable. That's not a heresy, but it is incredibly sad.

And if you’re willing to compromise your functionality for anything, it just means that you are okay with being incompetent as long as you can justify it with some strict moral ideology. That’s equally sad.

How exactly is anyone "incompetent" for refusing to use Plex and spend some time to use, e.g, Kodi?

Because spending time to fix and Jerry-rig a product means you’re not spending time doing something else. You’re operating on a slower time scale and you’re spending your time on projects that aren’t of primary importance.

> Because spending time to fix and Jerry-rig a product means you’re not spending time doing something else

Homo-economicus reasoning is fallacious and makes for very boring people. There is very little "Jerry rigging" around nowadays when setting up Kodi on a media PC and the time one "spends" learning pays itself in peace of mind knowing that you are building resilience and won't have to worry about things like a company exposing personal data.

That works for me, but it doesn’t work when my extended family uses the product too.

Right, because spending time curating your pirated media collection is very high on the importance scale... Sounds like your time would be better spent just subscribing to some streaming services and not using either Plex nor Jellyfin / Kodi.

My time would be better spent working on a project instead of explaining to my father’s girlfriend’s son how to solve whatever problem he’s having with the software.

The whole point is that it’s not important and I don’t want to spend my time on it.

> Stash is a web-based application. Once the application is running, the interface is available (by default) from http://localhost:9999

Seriously considering to open a feature request and change that default port to 6969.

This feature was opt out and it was very obvious to do so. There’s a lot of comments for jellyfin but it’s not nearly as good. If you have a tiny library maybe it will be okay. If you have 3 or more different devices and a large library, it’s not up to the task. I spent 3 weeks evaluating it side by side and it just isn’t good enough.

I use Jellyfin -- what's a large library? I have 500 movies and it works perfectly. Hooked up to a Digital Ocean Spaces Bucket. I also have dozens of users connecting to my server. 4GB RAM, AMD CPU. My fear of plex is them mandating a payment charge in the future. Jellyfin will always be free and open.

The main issue IMO comes from the clients moreso than the server. The Jellyfin App on Nvidia Shield sometimes fails or crashes when trying to change audio source. Subtitles always fail to load, and there was a period of time that local shows & movies looked like they were playing in 480p quality.

The issues were to the point that locally I use Emby, and keep Jellyfin remote for web client usage since syncplay is great.

Matching and navigation were the biggest issues. I also had problems on every client where I had to change settings per client whereas Plex “just works” on every device (phones, tablets, tv, shield, and many others)

JF is a great free solution and I’m not trashing it let’s just not pretend it is as good or better than Plex. It’s just not.

I have a fairly large library, and Jellyfin works just fine. It certainly has its rough edges, but everything works well enough.

Regardless, I'd very easily take fewer features, less polish, and even broken functionality, if the alternative is something that spies on what I watch and shares it with others.

I have thousands of movies and tens of thousands of TV episodes.

If you're doing a tabular feature comparison, I'm sure Plex comes out on top. But Jellyfin does everything I want and need, and snappily.

Whoa... I just can't believe they've done this. It's a big middle finger to their customers who have paid for this software. I expect this behavior from "free" youtube etc hosting. Not from software I paid for.

I love Plex as it "just works" for those of us who host our own media libraries. But this move just feels like a shot across the bow to their paying user base. I can't make sense of the move? Is this the beginning of the end for Plex? How will I know when it's time to abandon ship?

And, as a paying user, who can I complain to?

> Otto Kerner, who is a moderator of the official Plex forums, said that porn viewing habits would only be shared if Plex can make a “match” of the media with online databases like IMDb. “Many pr0n titles are either not listed there at all [sic], Kerner wrote.

I'm almost more amazed that this was their response. "Eh, it probably didn't share your title..."

Jellyfin is great, pers, and is superior along the one axis that matters: freedom.

So... asking for a friend... does someone want to compile a "Most Watched on Plex" list?

TIP: don't update your plex server. Really all you want is to watch your stuff and don't want any of the junk they keep pushing. You can get that by not succumbing to FOMO.

Obvious disclaimer is to not connect your server to the internet.

I think my Plex version is 5-10 years old. I really don’t need any new features and my next upgrade will probably be to jellyfin or something else.

Or switch to Jellyfin and forget about all the Plex bullshit.

Bear in mind that not updating your Plex server could leave you open to security vulnerabilities. The most notable example of this is last year's massive LastPass breach, which began with malware installed on a LastPass employee's home computer via a RCE exploit in their out-of-date Plex Media Server instance. [1]

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/lastpass-employee-couldve-prevent...

Meh, this guy was targeted and opened an attachment or was tricked into doing something, that's how the malware originally got on his home computer, which then targeted the Plex server. You don't just randomly exploit someone's Plex server when it's behind their firewall.

Why is "LastPass" almost always followed up with "Breach"? Are they exceptionally insecure, or just exceptionally transparent?

They are the most transparent company I have ever seen. And they have a big target on their backs...

Yeah, I got this unasked for and unwanted email for a friends activities on my plex. It told me he was watching a lot of kids shows (not surprising has he has young kids).

I find it deeply disturbing and am seriously considering JF.

Have people forgotten that they can just store files in folders on filesystems and load them over the network?

hmm, I wonder if there's any value on top of that functionality that Plex provides?

What about users accounts to the share the files and then adminstrating those users over the internet, what about metadata and images for browsing. What about viewing on Smart TVs. Plex and jellyfin offer a lot of functionality that your suggestion wouldn't account for so I don't think anyone has forgotten they just find a personal Netflix to share with family and friends very useful.

I did this for a while, but there are some features of things like Jellyfin that attracted me and I've gotten value out of. A major one is maintaining a record of your progress. Depending on your viewing habits, including how many devices you may use, as well as other aspects, this can be very useful. For example: watching a video on a desktop computer in one room and resuming its playback in another room.

My friends will quickly understand who’s behind those paw patrol binges

Much like my Spotify 'year in review', which last year saw my #1 song as "Return to Pooh Corner" by Kenny Loggins, played for 1600 minutes.

Jellyfin works well. A feature I'd like to see though is more thumbnail generation that's not chapter based.

Jesus christ, people have their own plex servers of porn? That's commitment I guess.

It's easier to just be open about stuff. A lot less to worry about honestly. Once you stop caring what other people think, you become unburdened.

You don't care what your family thinks? And you don't mind sharing your sexual interests with your children too? Interesting family you have.

It is illegal to be gay in 65 countries.

Why worry about privacy if you've got nothing to hide...

Everyone has something to hide. https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...

My point exactly. My sarcasm did not ring through but I was thinking about what Eric Schmidt said. Why worry about privacy if you have nothing to hide? Everyone has something to hide, and even if they didn't, that does not negate privacy

I’m far from a privacy absolutist, but it’s an unserious suggestion to recommend sharing your porn preferences with your extended family, and I think you know that.

I want to live your life where people's porn history is just cool to share with friends and family. Totally absent of boundaries and social norms. "My dad likes redhead lesbian petites, it's chill". Much more viable world than, idk, more granular privacy settings.

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