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Plex Security Incident

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21–30 of 94 posts

Re: Plex Security Incident

#21

> Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party. I am glad they were hashed, but that's a misleading statement. The point of hashing is to slow an attacker down, even with full best security practices (e.g. salt + pepper + argon2 w/high factors) they can still be reverse engineered. It is a matter of when , not i…

Maybe this is naive, but in a good crypto system, I would hope "when" is measured in millions or billions of years given current hardware capabilities.

Re: Plex Security Incident

#22

I am a faithful Plex lifetime user and have never had problems. That said, I shouldn't be blinded by convenience. I hear jellyfin is a good alternative. Can someone share - how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country? - how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility -what about for streaming music? I really like Plex am…

I ran plex for years but gave up once they started tracking all activity.

Jellyfin is way to administer. Clients are rough and often crash. Influx is often the best choice for IOS but has its own... weird decisions on how to handle libraries.

The main thing I miss is being able to download transcoded media for mobile devices so I can watch on a plane.

Re: Plex Security Incident

#23

I am a faithful Plex lifetime user and have never had problems. That said, I shouldn't be blinded by convenience. I hear jellyfin is a good alternative. Can someone share - how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country? - how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility -what about for streaming music? I really like Plex am…

I'll fill in what I can -

>- how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country?

Jellyfin is just the software, not a hosted solution. I use a simple server/seedbox, with sane configs (good providers have automated this), which results in a secure public-facing admin console with a username/password. They have basic user management features to include other users in your server.

> - how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility

Jellyfin has a broad ecosystem of apps on a bunch of platforms, each with their pros and cons. I recommend poking around. When figuring my setup out, I downloaded 3 or 4 different Android apps to pick the one I liked (support for multiple servers which isn't a given in all the apps)

> -what about for streaming music? I really like Plex amp IMO Plex has always been substandard here since they hoisted the music interface into the same one they use for everything else, so it's really lacking in filters/administration features I depend on. That said Jellyfin supports music and has the same simple feature set.

> - what do you like the most about jellyfin

It's free and untethered to a company's whims. It also does a lot less of the social/DVR stuff that I have no interest in.

>- what do you miss most about Plex?

Their app experience was a bit more premium, and their support for multiple servers is better than Jellyfin since they own the servers/hosting to do it. I also really used to enjoy the 'remote' functionality where I could skip episodes by clicking next on the Plex app in my phone. This hasn't worked for a few years for me despite heavy troubleshooting.

Re: Plex Security Incident

#24
post #3

Not necessarily related, but I'll take the opportunity to share my dislike of this company. Like others, they built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices. Over the last couple of years, Plex has continued to strip functionality, add paywalls, make deals with publishing companies, and take other actions that firmly put them in the 'enshittif…

One thing I'll note is that while I've found every device surface I've come across has a Plex app, that isn't true of Jellyfin. YMMV.

Re: Plex Security Incident

#25
post #3

Not necessarily related, but I'll take the opportunity to share my dislike of this company. Like others, they built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices. Over the last couple of years, Plex has continued to strip functionality, add paywalls, make deals with publishing companies, and take other actions that firmly put them in the 'enshittif…

I like Jellyfin, but I keep using Plex for two reasons. First is subtitle support is quite limited in comparison. It fails more often than it works for me. Second is the lack of skipping. This is with the Android TV client, haven't really tried the others.

Fair, I handle subtitles in my ingestion pipeline and so those are ready to go by the time Jellyfin gets involved.

Skipping, do you mean skipping intros and such? Or something else?

Re: Plex Security Incident

#26

I am a faithful Plex lifetime user and have never had problems. That said, I shouldn't be blinded by convenience. I hear jellyfin is a good alternative. Can someone share - how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country? - how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility -what about for streaming music? I really like Plex am…

Not sure about jellyfin, but I really dig Emby. Just as convenient as Plex. I can't even remember why I switched to Emby over Plex, but I never looked back.

Re: Plex Security Incident

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I still need to mess with filenames in order to have jellyfin pick them up to create the library?

Yes. This is the flaw in Jellyfin that makes it a non-starter for me. One time I spent like two hours updating all the metadata, and then some strangely worded button reset it all. Haven't used it since.

>then some strangely worded button reset it all

"Reset universal entropy"

Re: Plex Security Incident

#28
You have to be a fool to use Plex, not only you are pirating, but also relying on a 3rd party company to handle your authentication. They already got hacked multiple times, only a matter of time till there is some copyright law enforcement event too.

If you really have to do it, use Emby or Jellyfin. At least those options are fully self hosted.

Re: Plex Security Incident

#29
post #3

Not necessarily related, but I'll take the opportunity to share my dislike of this company. Like others, they built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices. Over the last couple of years, Plex has continued to strip functionality, add paywalls, make deals with publishing companies, and take other actions that firmly put them in the 'enshittif…

Do I still need to mess with filenames in order to have jellyfin pick them up to create the library?

If you categorize your libraries into their correct directories (i.e. TV into TV, movies into movies), then no.

Their metadata lookup is quite solid.

Re: Plex Security Incident

#30
post #26

I am a faithful Plex lifetime user and have never had problems. That said, I shouldn't be blinded by convenience. I hear jellyfin is a good alternative. Can someone share - how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country? - how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility -what about for streaming music? I really like Plex am…

Not sure about jellyfin, but I really dig Emby. Just as convenient as Plex. I can't even remember why I switched to Emby over Plex, but I never looked back.

Emby performs better than Jellyfin IME, at least if you need it to work on older TVs. Though IDK if they still offer a lifetime (pay once) subscription.
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