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Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner
- ericls 3y agoI'm not against them punishing people who violated the policies, but this doesn't look like a good solution to that problem.
- wkat4242 3y agoA service that exists to enable piracy is banning piracy? Good luck :P This is like when OnlyFans tried to ban porn. Just close up shop then. I mean let's be honest. Piracy is the raison d'etre for Plex just like porn is for OnlyFans.
- dmitrygr 3y ago> I mean let's be honest. Piracy is the raison d'etre for Plex just like porn is for OnlyFans. Strange, I have been using it for years to stream my own movie collection (ripped by me from my own DVDs) to my chromecasts and phones.
- Someone1234 3y agoYou're in the minority.
- wkat4242 3y agoBut Plex exists to share it with your friends which makes it piracy. It's their added value over something like Kodi.
- dijit 3y agosharing with friends isn't actually piracy. Where did you get that notion? You can invite friends over to watch a movie with you, you can lend a movie too. Copyright law has fuzzy carve outs for this.
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah 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.
- dmitrygr 3y ago> It's their added value over something like Kodi. Strange again, I thought that value was easy setup and that it "actually works"(tm)
- jnsie 3y agoI 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
- cacois 3y agoTechnically that's still illegal in the US. Breaking DVD encryption is not legal, so ripping them is not legal.
- Someone1234 3y agoIt 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.
- cacois 3y agoThanks 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.
- vorpalhex 3y agoLook, I'm not sayin it stands for Pirate Netflix.. I'm just saying nobody has ever said it didn't stand for that.
- throwaway894345 3y agoI'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.
- cacois 3y agoCouldn't agree more, but this is why we don't have nice things. The digitizing of DVDs we lawfully own isn't legal.
- dijit 3y agoeh, 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.
- tacticalturtle 3y agoIf 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.
- sgt 3y agoUsing Hetzner cloud for production services (Frankfurt DC), so definitely not anything to do with piracy.
- Jamie9912 3y agoThats odd, I thought it would've been the other way around. More reason for people to move to Jellyfin/others
- judge2020 3y ago> 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.
- throwaway894345 3y agoAre there any new efforts to build an open source plex alternative? I know about Kodi, but it has its own glaring issues.
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- dijit 3y agoJellyfin?
- bo0tzz 3y agoJellyfin
- _ea1k 3y agoSeems like Emby and Jellyfin are the two most common alternatives.
- hattmall 3y agoWhen 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.
- menacingly 3y agoThe efforts to "go legit" from Plex are entertaining. They're cutting out the piracy like they're going to find something else under there. "these pirates, who constitute a percentage of our business that rounds to 100, are really getting in the way of our business"
- wkat4242 3y agoI 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.
- drcongo 3y agoThe catalog of legit movies on there is worse than the bargain bin of a long-closed, backwater Blockbuster.
- TylerE 3y agoKinda like when tumblr banned all the porn
- OJFord 3y agoTumblr 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!
- TylerE 3y agoThe ban was in late 2018. Tumblr monthly unique visitors dropped 41% in 2019, from 512m to 370m. You be the judge.
- mellosouls 3y agoAlready discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517216
- neoromantique 3y agoOh, so that's what this email was about. 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. Good riddance
- whalesalad 3y agohttps://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/
- Rebelgecko 3y agoHow effective is Jellyfin as an alternative? When I tried it un the past it still had some rough edges (especially the app)
- alphabettsy 3y agoIt’s workable, but not as nice. I switched back.
- nilsb 3y agoAs 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.
- newsclues 3y agoI 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.
- edsimpson 3y agoWhat’s a good app for iOS or tvOS? It looks like the official jellyfin app for iOS hasn’t been updated in a year.
- newsclues 3y agoI've only used Jellyfin but good enough not to consider switching to Plex.
- 3y ago
- micromacrofoot 3y agoIt's unfortunate, but I imagine Plex is often on the precipice of being litigated out of existence (whether or not said litigation is actually valid).
- berkle4455 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sccxy 3y agoHosting pirate content in Germany is risky anyway. I thought it is very common to get "warning letters" from lawyers with 500 eur "fine" for torrenting.
- nerf0 3y agoWho's laughing now Hetzner? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728
- zzzeek 3y agoit 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.
- traveler01 3y agoIt's always amusing watching companies committing suicide.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMore discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517216
- dustedcodes 3y agoWhat 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?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoPlex is a self hosted media center that has trimmings to allow you to stream to mobile devices and the web. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200288286-what-is-plex/ https://support.plex.tv/articles/200288286-what-is-plex/
- notesinthefield 3y agoIt 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.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoI never understood why Plex was so popular. Serviio[0] is much better IMO. [0]https://serviio.org/ https://serviio.org/
- kyriakos 3y agoWhat'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.