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?
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.
Doesn’t Jellyseer take care of this? It integrates with your arr stack and suggests content based on your views and media. You can set it to auto approve or wait for your ok. I just finished building me a server 2 weeks ago because my initial testing with an old laptop and Jellyfin went so well. Hooking up my parents this week (again, with better performance).
I love wireguard for this. If they can’t get that working, then no jellyfin for them. Filters out the PEBKAC people wonderfully.
Thanks for introducing me to PEBKAC, great term.
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.
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.
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.
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