From bouncing around my favorite corners of the Internet, I get the impression that large numbers of people have “a guy” (of any gender), akin to a weed dealer in furtiveness and legality, who is hooking them up with an underground, probably Plex-based (but increasingly moving to Jellyfin), streaming service. I get the impression that there are hundreds to thousands of these little “Plex server” operations, each serving a couple dozen to a hundred or so users out of the goodness/vileness of each “guy”'s heart and the hobby budget of that “guy”'s homelab. This isn’t all Plex gets used for or even necessarily the main use case, but I think they’re out there.
Obviously no “guy” will admit to doing this, but my “Plex Server Guy Theory” neatly explains this post announcing that general discussions of piracy are allowed in the Lemmy.ml Plex community and this post by someone apparently serving enough new Plex user volume that a webhook would be convenient to have. I’ve also seen people discussing Plex refer to “my users”, as if they have a user base of friends and trusted or semi-trustred acquaintances rather than just a household or family.
I personally neither have nor am a “Plex Server Guy”, nor do I know anyone who has admitted to me that they do have or are one, so I can’t be sure they really exist. But I have suspicions.
Are “Plex Server Guys” as I imagine them real and common and I am just too square to have ever been invited to do crimes with everyone else? Are they rare in real life but enriched in the dubious/cool corners of the Internet? Does it depend on your country? What’s the deal?
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Dated a guy last year who had access to a giant plex library. He just told me a friend let him log in tob theirs. So ya, plex guys do exist.
Why would people do that? People don’t do that.
I run an Emby server, but just for family. Two of my kids use it, one doesn’t. I posted previously that my daughter doesn’t have anything that can play a DVD, but she still gets them and I add them to my server so she can watch them.
I added my parents to it, and they watched some stuff, but they can’t remember how to use it. Every time I show them, my dad will watch things for a few days, then he forgets how.
I appear to be unique among the people running streaming servers in that I only add things if I own the DVD (or if they’re in the public domain). I also only have about 1300 movies.
I visit thrift stores to get cheap DVDs. There’s one near me that charges $1/DVD, but they have a 50% off sale on the last weekend of every month.
I’m trying to be more particular about what I add. I had started thinking that for 50¢, I can buy a shittier movie, but now I’m only getting the movie if I know it’s worth it, or if it’s got > 7 IMDB rating.
Today’s haul included True Grit (the remake), Capote, and Ready Player One.
Plenty of sub 7 IMDb cult classics :) you’re missing out
Good on you, but I would never pirate Ready Player One, let alone pay $0.50 for it.
Depends what industry you’re in, I guess
I’m in tech and there are more Plex guys than people looking for Plex guys
I am that guy. I got pissed off that there was no way to buy all of the episodes of Good Eats legally. Next thing I knew, I had a dual xeon server and 60TB of hard drives. Of the 50 or so people using my server I think 6 have servers of their own.
For me it was buying star trek the next generation on blu-ray and getting annoyed with having to flip through fifty disks to watch an episode.
Good Eats radicalized me too. Not for plex but for cooking.
How so
Alton Brown’s enthusiastic and educational way he did the cooking show helped bring home cooking to a lot of people. For me, we watched it in my middle school’s cooking class
Alton showed me a few things and taught me that if I was patient I could figure it out the rest of the way. That was almost 20 years ago. Now I happily share cooking duty with my wife.
I named a dog after him. It didn’t stick, and my daughter named the dog after a kid in class’s little brother, but the through was there.
Did you find a good source for good eats? The only one I found was low quality TV rips.
Usenet
There was a community when I first moved to Lemmy where people could advertise their Plex/Jellyfin servers that they were willing to share, either for a fee or free. No idea if it is still around or active.
I have a Plex server guy. He is one of my oldest and best friends although we don’t get to hang out much anymore. I know he has other friends he shares the Plex server with but I have no idea who or how many. I’ve been using it since Plex was new, not sure how long exactly but more than a decade. I occasionally buy him nice hard drives because the library is ridiculously huge and always growing. As someone who loves weird and obscure shit, it’s my favorite streaming service by far and he’s my hero for running it.
I’m a Plex server guy for friends and family, I have about a dozen users and maybe 3-4 at a time at the peaks. I charge nothing, it’s just a hobby. We’re out there.
I’d switch to Jellyfin but my users need transcoding and Plexamp is my favorite audio player since Winamp.
I’m a Jellyfin Server Guy, and same deal. Around a dozen friends & fam, no charge.
I’m not sure why needing transcoding would keep you off Jellyfin though, Jellyfin transcodes just fine.
Does Jellyfin not do transcoding? I’ve been using it with transcoding for almost two years, so if it doesn’t, man that’s gonna be quite the shock.
It definitely does do transcoding.
I dunno, maybe it didn’t when I was first setting up my server a few years back. It doesn’t have Plexamp though and that’s a deal breaker.
It has finamp though right
Doesn’t have the excellent Plexamp automix nor ability to add all my friends shares to my radio stations.
I appreciate the efforts but I’m very happy with my current setup. It works, it’s almost zero maintenance, and I got lifetime plex pass for like $50 years ago.
I’m that guy as well, but can’t get family to use it. So when they complain they can’t stream something, I just ignore them. I do it for myself, they just get it because. But I’m not going to keep offering, fuck it. Go spend your money on shitty streaming services. I’ve got 7000 movies now and almost 300 series.
I’m specifically doing this to get family and friends to cancel their streaming subscriptions. Not to save them money, to hurt the corporations more than I can do just myself.
Can’t make someone do something they don’t want to, even if it benefits them financially. I stopped trying.
True that. I don’t pressure them into it.
Wild to me that people are that stubborn. I am lucky that a friend gave my access to their server. I just feel bad asking for stuff even though they tell me all the time to ask for anything I want.
I offer to pay or buy some hard drive space but they say it’s okay.
Do you know if I can join more than one server? Do you guys think people will offer stuff like that? What do you guys think about IPTV people?
I’ve seen a few friends boast about their IPTV but as far as I’m co concerned the content is low quality and mostly filled with so much unnecessary content and the UI is very janky.
My Plex Guy (Jellyfin Guy, technically) made a discord bot for our server so we can request movies/shows and have them autodownload. I’m also constantly asking my family on my own local Jellyfin server to suggest more movies. Don’t be afraid to ask your Guy for anything, we get a dopamine hit from it.
I love wireguard for this. If they can’t get that working, then no jellyfin for them. Filters out the PEBKAC people wonderfully.
I’ve been wondering about this, how does hiding the activity from your ISP, as well as the ISP of the person streaming from your server, work?
I have friends I’d like to share my library with but am always nervous about the risk.
With P2P file sharing, your client is sharing the files with random people on the internet and you’re identified by your IP address (or a VPN IP address / seedbox IP address / etc). MPAA hires companies to check for popular content and log the IP address, time, and content shared, and then sends that to the ISP. The risk and issue is sharing content with anyone randomly, since that is how your ISP is informed of the activity.
With media servers, unless you’re somehow sharing publicly, it’s safe to assume your members aren’t going to report you to your ISP. I guess in theory the ISP could see high upload bandwidth and investigate, but more likely than not, if there are limits, automated systems will just throttle the bandwidth, and no deep packet inspection or other forensics is performed.
TLS/https will be enough to hide your streaming activity. They’ll be able to see that you’re streaming something based off of the traffic patterns, but won’t be able to see what specifically is being streamed.
Why would that matter? It just looks like HTTPS traffic if you set it up right. And even if they fingerprint it as Plex, they can’t see what exactly is playing. Yes, my Plex library only has public domain content of course.
HTTPS
I can’t say how many people are trying to make money on it, but there are plenty of folks running Plex or Jellyfin servers that they’ll allow friends and family to access. And I would estimate that a fairly low percentage of those have no pirated content on them. So even for the small-group servers, discussions of piracy are often relevant.
I do run a Jellyfin server, but only locally on my own network.
I’ve ditched all streaming services in favour of a friend’s 40tb Plex server, running from the server room of the university where he works. It’s rock solid and has everything I want to watch.
Anything he can’t find, or that I personally want my own access to goes in my own Jellyfin server.
It’s great. Better than spending £50 a month on a couple of services.
Sounds like a great way to get fired from a job. Mirror as much as you can from him while he still has it up, but also probably limit it so that the bandwidth doesn’t raise any alarms.
yes but usually at the family and friends distribution level
I just wanted to be able to watch my movies on the TV. And then…I have like a dozen users with only 1-3 accessing the server at any given time. Now it is something special. I seriously need to get a NAS.
👋
Most of us run systems for friends, family, even a few coworkers; but there are those out there that sell access to their systems to anyone willing to pay. This is explicitly forbidden by the TOS of Plex/Emby, and I’m pretty sure Jellyfin as well (haven’t checked that one), but it still happens.
There’s even tools like Ombi to automatically manage requests from users passing them to Radarr/Sonarr to be retrieved.
Jellyfin doesn’t have a TOS, it’s open source license allows using the software in any way you want
Well that answers that question. Thanks :)
I mean, Kaity and I run a Jellyfin server for our family to access, as well as a couple of friends. But that’s about as public as it gets…
i love this post
