Live data from Hacker News

Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner

forums.plex.tv

101–110 of 121 posts

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

#101
post #98
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#102
post #99
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Jellyfin on my home server, and this has been a problem for me as well. Even within my home network I'll have occasional stuttering while watching movies, despite the fact that I'm using a dedicated server with 128gb of RAM and 12 CPUs, with a 10 gigabit network card in a 10 gigabit switch, and I'll still get stuttering. I've debated moving to Plex but I'm broadly against running proprietary software on a serve…

> I'm using a dedicated server with 128gb of RAM and 12 CPUs, I mean wow, that's quite a setup to watch movies! It puts my dedicated intel i5 nuc (using plex w/ ubuntu) with 8G to shame. You must take your movies very seriously!

I misused the word "dedicated"; the server is actually used for lots of stuff. What I meant is that I didn't repurpose an old desktop or anything, it's an actual rack mounted server.

I run NixOS on there with a bunch of different services, though the only thing that comes anywhere near mattering resource-wise is JellyFin when it's transcoding.

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

#103

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.

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.

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

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

#104
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's undoubtedly a lot, of course. If Plex somehow prevented (built-in CV detection of anything commercial vs. home video being played from your own library, say) pirated content I think MAU would drop approximately 100% though!

Ripping a DVD collection to which I own the originals is not piracy in my country. In fact, we pay a tax by the GB for every writable storage medium we purchase (everything, from HDDs to the SD card I load into my camera, including actual phones) that goes to authors and accounts for “private copies” like those. I use Plex and the RAWs from my camera take a lot more of my media server's HDD than any DVD rips.

I sympathise and think that should be legal in any country (I've long thought that the sale should be of 'the right to view' more than the physical medium, Sony and others toyed with it for BluRay which I was thrilled aboutthe potential future of, but canned it recently-ish) but I don't think that materially affects my hypothetical, for one thing it could trivially be applied only to other regions.

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've given this a legitimate shot two times, both self-hosting and via a professional host and both times on I have massive streaming problems on a 1 gig connection. It, on paper, has competitive features to Plex but Plex streams almost as reliably as Netflix does.

I run it on my laptop, and when I want to watch a new episode of a TV show, or a movie, I search for it on 1337x.to, find the mp4 with the most seeders, copy the magnet link, paste it into Transmission and then press enter. Within half an hour, the file is in the folder where Jellyfin knows to look for it. Then I open Jellyfin on my phone and watch the content in bed. This works for me because I've never cared about…

I use stremio on phone or table when I need to relax, mainly since I have a thing with checking old videos from archive.org but you can actually use it for torrents as well.

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

#106
post #67
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Pa…

it was not really porn. it was nude and erotica and nsfw and generally artists expressing themselves freely. they banned all that

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

#107
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

I've been told Thailand is suitable

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

#108

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.

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.

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

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#110

https://jellyfin.org/

I tried Jellyfin vs Plex, I forget why, but it’s like how I wound up buying a Subaru because on paper it looked like it checked all the boxes. It does technically check all the boxes but it’s still unpleasant to drive in a myriad of little ways, just like Jellyfin. Checking boxes doesn’t add up to a pleasant user experience.
Post reply on HN