Plex needs to stop trying to reinvent itself and just stick to what it's good at, otherwise people are just going to start changing to Jellyfin.

Crunchyroll started as an anime piracy site, now they're worth 1.2 billion dollars, I can see why the pirate to legit path is so tempting for them

Want an alternative to piracy? Revert the streaming market to where it was 6-7 years ago, when ALL you needed was a Prime and a Netflix account, rather than 100+ services that all now exist to silo content people would be more than happen to pay for. What we AREN'T prepared to do is pay for a dozen or more services that are all offering less and less, and using our sub fees to push intersectional crap they produce. To get the content I desire right now would have once cost about $30/month for 2 or 3 services. Now, to access that same content I'd be up for well over $150/month. Guess what, I now sail the 7 seas even though I'd be happy to pay a fair amount, but I'm not given that option any longer.

When the pirates have a better experience than your paying customers, it's justifiable to pirate (IMO, ofc)

The thing is, ripping your OWN blue-rays is illegal in Germany. You’re not allowed to circumvent copy protection even for own use… it’s really stupid

LTT: Hey Plex we are so happy you fixed the issues that were our concerns, we'd love to have a relationship again Plex: Can you please stop calling us sponsors of Piracy?

Oh and piracy has become completely justifiable again, due to streaming services now becoming a pain in the ass. Back in the late 2000s everyone had Netflix, and Netflix had a huge catalog that kept growing with content from all different companies. Now you have like 20 different streaming services and it's a nightmare to even find what service has the thing you want to watch, and it gets to a point some devices may not even have apps for a certain service or maybe their app sucks (for example the HBO app on my android box supports HDR perfectly with no setup, the Amazon app doesn't). When piracy is more convenient than paying for the content, then piracy not only will exist but it deserves to exist and thrive. I'm very radical about this, if you want to charge for a service it needs to be better and more convenient than pirating it, otherwise piracy is better.

If you are selling a Plex pirate service and you are reading this, please start just selling access to the library through something like NFS so we can just run our own Plex instances. I would pay you more money to not have to deal with the constant plex share bans.

Not going to lie, I absolutely would download a screwdriver.

i love luke just calling plex servers just "linux isos" its gold lmao

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell. If people are willing to go to the hard route of pirating media and still pay for a service like Plex, underscores a critical problem in how media services are structured today. The gaming industry's success in curbing piracy through centralized, affordable, and user-friendly platforms like Steam serves as a testament. Currently, the media streaming landscape remains fragmented, with people subscribing to multiple services each month just to access content they wont even own. Addressing this fragmentation is crucial to mitigating piracy's relevance.

I love that my ISP, Bahnhof, is one of the leaders in radical protection of personal privacy in Sweden. They regularly challenge and call out politicians and police on bad behaviour and refuse to give out customer information regarding IPs unless the police fills out a formal request that specifies whar crime it relates to and it has to have prison time as a possible sentence to be valid. They also offer a cheap VPN service hosted in their server halls that basically just washes your IP through a server that doesn't require IP logging because it is run by someone else. Which is the 5th of July Foundation (spun off by Bahnhof) named after the date when UN adopted the resolution about human rights on the Internet

It's a very common and known fact. First you start as a service that cater to pirates and once you grow a sufficient pool of user you go 180 and turn corpo. That's the story of most internet services.

Friendship ended with Plex. Now Jellyfin is my best friend.

If companies would stop forcing us to use THEIR streaming app, I feel like a lot of the piracy would stop. Nobody wants to pay $10 a month for a service they only use for a single show.

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Given that companies are deleting from existence images, movies and shows, "piracy" will be the way content will be preserved into the future.

Im just gonna stick to JellyFin since they won’t change up on us

Amazing how once all the streaming services got fragmented and u need 6million different accounts suddenly priacy is back.

The problem is the people who are selling access to their plex server, essentially profitting from the pirated work.

Pirate Party got deregistered after filing paperwork fell to me. Overly bureaucratic meetings were bleeding supporters for a while.

> use proprietary software > get forked by shitty business decisions > move to different proprietary software > rinse and repeat. People never learn.

if buying a product isn't ownership privacy isn't stealing

if you dont want people to pirate, dont charge absolutely outrageous fees for streaming services (and theres also like 4 of them, all with different things.)

I will do my duty to the reborn pirate party and 3d print an LTT screwdriver the moment i get home!

kinda ashamed how long it took me to realize the term "linux ISOs" was a funny secret phrase

Are we not going to mention when plex servers were hacked and user data was leaked? I switched to Jellyfin after that.. literally no reason why I should have to connect to a 3rd party server when I'm already hosting the server on my own hardware.

Other uses for Plex. I can share my Comcast cable remotely with the right setup, and don't have to pay for cable again. That can only be shared with "home" users.

I would disagree with the characterization that PLEX was designed to cater to pirates. There was a time when people legitimately owned huge collections of movies on DVD and BluRay. In those days there was a movement toward methods of watching that content without the need to put the disc in the player each time you wanted to see something. Streaming wasn't a thing then because most people didn't have the internet speed for it, and while you technically could pirate stuff, you had to run a torrent instance on your PC, keep it connected 24/7 and it could take weeks to download an entire video. There were a couple of ways to rip and stream your own stuff, the two biggest were Windows XP Media Center Edition and PLEX, both at the time were intended to be used in a home network typically from a PC connected to a TV. Windows MCE died as streaming services took off, and PLEX for a long time was the last user operated streaming platform. No argument that it's used for piracy, but that's like blaming the spoon for your weight problem. Yes, the spoon is a wonderful ice cream delivery device.. but it was the user, not the spoon's designer, who used it to eat a quart of Ben and Jerry's every day for the last two years.

I thought I was done with piracy as a working adult (prices are so unfair to kids), but... I mean... Movies: I try to find a thing I want to watch. Half the scenes are now censored out (Black elliot fantasy in scrubs, anyone? Turk Chocolate man?), the music got replaced and ruined, and movies that are over 10 years old, even 20, are either unavailable on streaming services or for whatever reason require me to pay 10 bucks to rent them. Games: I try to stick to steam only. Over the years, I've created a massive steam collection. I like Steam. Steam is the best. HOWEVER --- Now I got me some of them kids.... I saved up a lot of kid-friendly games over the years, awaiting great deals and such. Now, these kids can't even play DIFFERENT games, on DIFFERENT computers, and neither can I, myself! Because family sharing actually doesn't allow you to play different games at the same time. If it was the same game, I'd understand. But I'm not giving my kids their own steam accounts, nor am I rebuying these games. If I still had these games on physical media (CD, DVD, etc) or just licensing without a library tool like Steam, there wouldn't have been a single problem. I feel this is highly unfair and simply put; extremely stupid. Yeah, I'm not paying for those games again, sorry. They fucked it up, I'm not taking their responsibility.

Instead of trusting someone else computer and shared Internet, I bought an old Dell Optiplex with an 8th gen i7 for $300 shipped. Handles a almost a dozen hardware transcodes and as many direct streams as my network speed can support, which is more than enough for the 4-5 max streams between me, wife, and kids.

Leave it at hetzner setup a tailscale exit tunnel on a smaller vps / oracle free tier etc and route all the traffic. This is a cat and mouse game. Plex should directly audit accounts from plex servers sharing 100 users (max) instead of banning ip ranges from hetzner.

There was a short period of time when streaming was more convinient than pirating. Now? Nope. There is more than ten streaming services and the market is so segmented that it became a nightmare to use. Why pay for five or more services when you can download from one place for free?

If everything was on one platform that charged a reasonable price, piracy would not be nearly as prevalent as it is. The streaming service industry has made its own problem.

Its Hetzner because: They turn a blind eye against illegal stuff (If you dont get caught) They have very cheap servers with intel i7 and stuff with quicksync for transcoding It was just the perfect place

i recently learned about the pirate party recently while i was doing some data cleaning related to previous general elections! i went through literally every registered political party in every riding from 2011 - 2021 and the pirate party is the only name that still sticks out in my mind from that data

"you wouldnt download a screwdriver" Fun story: I had ..... legitimately acquired ..... an item of entertainment ..... that happened to have that "you wouldnt download a car" plug still in the lead in. When that line came up, I leaned forward and pressed spacebar to pause the video, opened a new tab, went to thingiverse, found a Lamborghini Diablo model (one of the nice detailed ones), waited for it to finish downloading, closed the tab, and unpaused the video. ....try tellin me what I wouldnt do....pfft, they dont know me! And if they're so brazenly wrong about that, I feel that doesnt bode well for any other statements they may have to make either, now does it?

I've just started collectibg Linux ISOs and haven't had much issues with the download feature. recompiling large Linux ISOs seems to be the biggest hurdle people are having. if your server hardware can't handle the job it could easily bomb out.

Wow dude... I rip every disc I buy and keep it in storage. I don't want to be the outlier here. I got into Plex 20 years after I stopped pirating. The only reason I did it was for my kids originally, but I got tired of streaming and started buying discs. No pirate here.

I actually take issue with the "dollar per reload" thing. It don't matter if I'm down to the last 5 players in a battle Royale: if a payment page popped up asking for a dollar, id uninstall right there.

It's becoming a proverb almost. You know which one. If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.

It's funny cause I'd bet if they make that list they'd get allot more paid subscriptions

If Plex want to look more legit, maybe they should go back to being a "personal media hub" by fixing the images side of things, fixing the download feature, anything else that makes sense for PERSONAL MEDIA. I got pro to support the product and give me an easy path to upload my phone media TO my server. They killed that feature 6 months later and gave me a load of garbage TV on demand stuff I never watch... I do it manually at the moment but close to just binning Plex, going to emby or whatever and use a own cloud setup as the backend. Media managed by own cloud, viewed by emby/jellyfish/osmc....

If buying isn't owning, piracy is not stealing.

Pirate Party politics are not just about piracy, the Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian pirate parties for instance platform on the importance of right to privacy, freedom and conservation of information and transparency in government, protection of whistleblowers, and so much else, and as they have grown have each developed full and comprehensive political platforms on social, financial, healthcare, and international issues. The Icelandic Pirate Party even holds 6 seats in the Icelandic Parliament.

For hosting in Europe I will stick with the french company OVH. Had servers there for over 10 years now and the only time I had an unscheduled downtime was when a RAM module broke. In the cheapest product line, explicitly marked as "not for production use". And they still replaced it within 4 hours after I called. Which is also why I initially ended up there: Price.

It’s crazy how many Linux ISOs are out there that need added to my collection. And then I view said ISOs on Jellyfin.

If you have an old Plex account you get all the features of the owner of the server, but newer accounts are feature gated. It’s an incredibly annoying system.

Can we all just agree that streaming isn't as convenient as piracy? As long as streaming doesn't offer literally every movie and series, piracy will exist. Media companies need to get their sh@t together and figure out easier licensing for older content. I still have to source dvds for some titles.

“Piracy is not a pricing issue, it’s a service issue” ~ Gabe Newell

Sounds like Plex is becoming the new KODI boxes as far as pirates selling access is concerned. Also Linus forgot the other reason some people hate Private Internet Access. They were bought by a company with a history of producing Malware.

Industry: Don't pirate stuff, respect our intellectual property. Also we don't respect your intellectual property; we'll use it how we see fit. Because AI.

I missed the past few WAN shows because KZfaq made changes. The WAN show isn't with the rest of the videos. Its in a different section for live streams.

Good thing I stuck with self-hosted Jellyfin I suppose

Was always thinking about moving to Jellyfish...

Blocking where you can self-host is a major negative to me. I've been using Jellyfin and now I won't go back because that's a red flag

The reason piracy exists is because of bad practices from streaming services and the movie industry as a whole. I'm looking forward to pay for quality indie movies in the future (where all involved is payed equally), because it's obvious the industry have no idea what they are doing. Jellyfin works excellent. We have a pirate party in Sweden too.

It is tough to stick with Plex as there are ongoing issues with their software that they haven't addressed while dumping resources into things no one wants or asked for. The headaches using the DVR function haven't improved in years.

If you make a "bug report" in Plexes user forums (because they don´t have any kind of actual customer support), the response will either be complete silence, or a scolding from a Plex fanboy telling you why you are wrong. Plex really don´t like their current customers, and they seem to work hard to get rid of them!

I have never subscribed to a streaming service and I never will. Every single one of them is a scam for both customers and investors.

Yar har fiddle tee dee ☠️🏴‍☠️

There's nothing wrong with copying information. It's not stealing because the owner of a medium of storage has had nothing stolen from them. Besides, patent/copright laws protect the large corporations most, by design.

I'm over the Eufy stuff. Wyze did a much worse thing to their customers, a security firm pointed it out to them, and for years neither said anything about it or fix it. That smells of a payoff to keep the security firm quiet. Wyze has also put originally free features behind a pay wall without grandfathering existing devices. What Eufy did wasn't great, but they've been transparent with it and have taken steps to improve. Nest products have been hacked and their monitoring services have caught employees spying on customers and saving photos and videos of the customers. Yet they're still around. Yes, Eufy does make a baby camera/monitor that doesn't have an online connection. It's actually pretty great.

Piracy always pays off, just go ask the cops; they know best.

I haven’t used Plex in a long while. I saw they were pushing me to use their centralised system, so I said they can go burn in heck, and jumped ship within the month to Jellyfin. I appreciate the features for non-technical users, but it’s unacceptable to me to that there wasn’t a way to completely remove all Plex-central integrations (or I just missed it). I actually just use my personal media. Like, I’m twenty, I don’t even have a VHS player anymore, so I can’t play my childhood tapes, without this.

Not sure, but I think it could be related to Germany fighting piracy (as Hetzner is Germany's company).

Plex is shotting itself in the foot these days. I get wanting to clean up the image and increase revenue but there missing the obvious big time. You advertise a product with features you need to make sure those features work or people are going to complain then walk away.

I legitimately backup my DVDs to digital and use the Plex frontend to stream on my home network from a local server. Idk if this will affect me. Doesn't sound like it.

i regret buying the lifetime pass..

I run my own Plex server off of an old Surface Book sitting on a cooling pad on my desk, hooked up to a big external drive. The GPU is fast enough to transcode for 1-2 users at a time, and can direct play many more screens at a time. Combined with a Plex Pass, it’s perfect for me and my family. The issue here is people hosting Plex boxes and selling library access, which I can understand Plex having a problem with.

In Croatia (wild east when it comes to copyright) there are 3-4 services with off the shelf android boxes set up to connect to their (mostly) plex server

Plex does not support ISO files, or any other disk image formats. You always need to convert your video into one of the MANY file formats it does however support (mkv, mp4, avi, etc....)

Let’s remember: Plex started by taking XBMC and adding a thin wrapper on top to turn it in to a server. I almost guarantee that there is still XBMC/Kodi code in the Plex binaries.

All i can say is why would i pay for 20 streaming services when i can bookmark two websites and have free access to everything available.

2:30 That's disgusting... where?.

it really doesn't make sense for Plex to do this, I mean I get that they're trying to clean up their image but from a legal standpoint Plex cannot be held responsible for how some people use their software. Now considering that a lot of pirates use Plex the only thing that this action will do is piss off their customers and they'll find another type of media hosting software to use.

About mobile downloads, it works for me. I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S21, and my videos are either H.264 or HEVC. You using a weird device or something?

"Piracy doesn´t pay" Yeah that´s the whole point I guess.

I think it would be smart to remix that Pirate Party live discovery as a short.

Just to help anyone out who thinks the download feature is broken, it’s not. The default is set to downgrade the quality which causes it to transcode. Change it to download at original quality and voila, works normally.

this is a good AD for Hetzner. Just saw their pricing ... Its good

This is why Jellyfin exist, and it's working flawlessly nowadays. Only thing missing is skip intro/credits natively.

"You wouldn't download a screwdriver". In all seriousness, if you guys had an option to buy the screwdriver bundled with like, a file for people to 3D print custom shell colors, I'd 100% buy at that option over the regular one. I mean, I'd never end up actually using the file, because I don't have a 3D printer, but y'know, I like the idea that I could.

Quite the Lars Ulrich view. Make sure you keep fighting against those evil ad-blockers as well.

I wonder if they'll try to implement this to prevent their users from pirating media and using plex to share it.

Plex is the best Jellyfin advertisement at this point.

Now that he isn't CEO anymore, Linus is looking for new opportunities such as running for prime minister of Canada

I actually want to see them do a video bringing back the Pirate Party of Canada with that person who used to run it and seemingly now works for them. Then, keep it going as a recurring election time joke. Maybe upload some LLT shows via torrents.

Switched to Jellyfin over a year ago now. Works great 👍

what if this was requested by hetzner? because if thousands of people are accessing someones plex being hosted by them then that can bog down hetzners servers and cause trouble for them.

I know anime pirate sites that look run and act more professional than any of the "legit" anime sites on the internet so I don't really get where the bad image could come from lol. At the end of the day if your product/service is desirable people will pay for it no amount of tricks or fake business changes will make people come to you.

Wait, they're going to block Hetzner? Good, now I know who to support. Hextner :)

“Challenges are challenging.” - Linus S. Manperson Esq.

*Laugh in Jellyfin and Kodi. *

Plex nuked my library a few months ago (confirmed via system logs) and support can't tell me why so I just swapped to jellyfin

I love plex's UI though over jelllyfin or emby

Not sure how you equate Plex with piracy. Plex is basically a database with the ability to stream linked files. Any piracy that exists is entirely outside the Plex server, and completely doable without Plex at all. The issue is almost certainly more to do with people selling access to their server.

My dad is livid about the whole piracy market. When VHS and DVD were created, he made tapes and cartridges that could count how many times they were watched. And Hollywood never adapted the technology. He's like, "Imagine going to a gas station and just driving off after filling up and not paying."

Mobile downloading has worked for me twice recently on 2 different phones now. You just change the setting in the mobile app, under Settings

We pirates are human, too. We deserve service, even if we can’t pay for it. We are poor but we are not animals