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Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

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Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#61

Post by sumtechguy »

hattmall wrote: post #38
throwaway894345 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#62

Post by TylerE »

menacingly wrote: post #6

The 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"

Kinda like when tumblr banned all the porn

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#63

Post by zzzeek »

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.

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#64

Post by tombert »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #59
tombert wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that during direct play or transcoding? 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. > Are you running a reverse proxy in front of it? Not within my home network.

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.

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#66

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

tombert wrote: post #46
mizzack wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that during direct play or transcoding? Are you running a reverse proxy in front of it? I'd check those things first.

> Is that during direct play or transcoding? 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. > Are you running a reverse proxy in front of it? Not within my home network.

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.

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#67

Post by OJFord »

TylerE wrote: post #62
menacingly wrote: post #6

The 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"

Kinda like when tumblr banned all the porn

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!

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#68

Post by TechBro8615 »

tombert wrote: post #64
TechBro8615 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ra…

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/

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#69

Post by rabuse »

paxys wrote: post #58
hotheadhacker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

#70

Post by dmitrygr »

wkat4242 wrote: post #22
dmitrygr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But Plex exists to share it with your friends which makes it piracy. It's their added value over something like Kodi.

> It's their added value over something like Kodi.

Strange again, I thought that value was easy setup and that it "actually works"(tm)

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