As you may have seen Plex decided it was OK today to send an email showing me what my friends have been watching. To be clear, this is Plex telling other people what I’ve been watching from my server, with my files, and this is not OK.
We all knew it was a matter of time before Plex started collecting data on our libraries and sharing it with advertisers. What happened to their “we don’t know, and don’t want to know, what is on your server”?. This, for me, is proof that those fears were absolutely founded in reality. On what planet would I ever want this information to be shared with friends on family on an OPT OUT basis?
It’s totally unacceptable to collect this data in the first place. It’s totally unacceptable to share this information with uniquely identifiable information. And it’s totally unacceptable to do this without explicitly asking me if it’s OK.
Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about this as a server admin, because technically these are Plex users and their marketing email preferences are controlled on the user side in the Plex website preferences. Not on your server.
This is an absolutely egregious overreach.
Thank goodness there are alternatives available in the form of Jellyfin and Emby. I left my Plex server up after the Jellyfin January challenge we did on the Self-Hosted podcast but because of this I feel that I have no choice but to take it down for good.
I’ve had plex and the arrs going but without a VPN (USA), got hundreds of take down notices sent to an old email address and went to spam folder, and two personal paper letters from ISP. I decided to shut down the arrs and haven’t torrented in about a few months.
A few weeks ago I added someone on plex to share my media with. Just got a 3rd letter from my ISP for sharing media. Plex is the only thing running that could cause this.
Time to finally shut it down and load Jellyfin. It’s been coming for some time; but this is the nail in the coffin.
so what’s the option now? jellyfin?
Thanks for the heads up, not a fan. I’ve been running it concurrently with Jellyfish but looks like it may be time to ditch it.
umm??? How does it share this data with respect to its own privacy statements???
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
M. What information does Plex collect from my Plex Media Server?
Plex does not share information about your Personal Content with third parties. Plex does not collect:
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Content titles of your Personal Content.
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Filenames EXCEPT those that may be collected under Debugging Information below.
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Metadata for Personal Content (e.g., information about the specific file, cover art, subtitles, running length, etc.) EXCEPT to customize viewed content syncing to enhance your account or if you have enabled metadata matching capabilities in which case such data will be anonymously sent to us or you have integrated with a third-party control or playback mechanism that requires us to access your metadata to play the relevant content (e.g., if you use Amazon Alexa to play a particular song or movie from your Personal Content, then our Services may search your Personal Content metadata in order to find and play the song or movie requested.)
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Jellyfin FTW!
Does Jellyfin have an adequate apple TV iphone and android client with library sharing thats comparable to plex? Im not trying to start a war here, i just want to know. Only reason I don’t use jellyfin is because back in the day it didnt have library sharing or a decent apple tv app.
I would love to switch but their agent is so bad. It only finds like 10% of my videos. I dont want to spend 80 hours searching the metadata one at a time.
Plexamp?
Unfortunately Jellyfin is just missing features. Opening and Credits skip? Nope. There is a plugin, but it doesn’t work with the Android client. On that front the Android client is so temperamental. Half the time it just doesn’t work on my Nvidia Shield. The UI is really clunky as well. I was using it for several months and the app just frustrated me so much I just went back to Plex.
Problem is my user base are TV and mostly non technical people. No way they setup and maintain a JellyFin install. That’s why Plex just wins.
What? Why would they need to setup a whole install to use your server? Just connect to the server in one of the numerous apps and login to your account?
And if JF won’t work for you, Emby is pretty decent as well.
What’s the safe way to expose jellyfin for users to access without a vpn or cloudflare tunnel (tos)
Made the switch to JF about 6 months ago, Never looked back!
I am also strongly considering to make the switch now. Any notable drawbacks/learnings from using it for 6 months?
JF has no proper chromecast support… ☹️😤
What do you mean? I have used chromecast with Jellyfin many times.
Chromecast in JF never worked…
When I click the chromecast icon in JF “Play On” (top right) I get “Google Cast Unsupported”.How did you manage to get it working?
This is why! It’s a crappy implication…
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/6840#issuecomment-1042905147
Android required, no iphonies
Jk, i eagerly await ios support but for now android only
Windows browsers such Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi, Brave have the same issue. It’s not OS or device related, it’s how Chromecast has been implemented in Jellyfin.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/6840#issuecomment-1042905147
I’m also the developer of a local media server, and I’ve easily managed to bypass the Chromecast client-side issues by doing a server-side discovery. Now no matter how I access my media content, I can always send it to a Chromecast, because the CC and my server are on the same network, so the CC can easily be discovered over Avahi/Bonjour/mDNS. Then it can be the server itself to provide the client with a list of discovered players, not necessarily the other way around.
The fact that there’s no server-side logic to manage the Chromecasts, and instead we rely on the client to discover them, explains why things are so broken. Why not provide a server-side CC scan logic as a backup for users who don’t use Chrome on Android but run the server on the same network as the CC, instead of relying on such a brittle client-side implementation?
Is it supported on tv makers?
No Apple TV client. Bummer.
Wdym TV makers?
They mean Smart TVs. My Dad’s Samsung TV has a Plex app, but no way to install anything like Kodi that would let him use Jellyfin instead of Plex to serve media.
Amazon stick is the cheapest (easy) way to turn any TV into a Jellyfin TV.
Personally, I’m getting increasingly annoyed with my Fire Stick. It’s kind of sluggish, and very locked-down. You used to be able to sideload a custom home launcher, but Amazon is cracking down on that. Their launcher is filled with bloat and ads. Recently I’ve noticed mine auto-playing Amazon Prime video trailers on boot which makes me want to throw it out the window.
I have JF installed on my Samsung (Tizen) TV and it works great. And the TV will auto-launch back into JF on boot… something I wish Fire Stick allowed.
How has been your experience with higher bitrate/quality stream directplay?
On my 4-5 year old Samsung TV I notice sluggish playback with 4K and high bitrate files with the Tizen Jellyfin app.
With plex the same files were working fine.
On my Desktop (using MPV) all files playback fine.
Now I think about buying something like a FireTV stick or Xiaomi TV Box…
Amazon Fire days being based on Android appear to be numbered. Doesn’t mean JF or any other client can’t have a React-based client for whatever Vega becomes if/when launched, but I’d expect it to take some time. The prior effort for a React-based client seemed to have died a number of years ago.
I’m also not a fan of Amazon’s streaming devices. I grabbed a 4k fire cube for $50 last year during one of their sales. This thing already lags like crazy and recently started playing an ad when you first turn it on. Annoying.
My 2017 NVidia Shield still rocks.
I’ve been tossing the idea around to set up a cheap mini NUC-like box, like a Beelink or something similar. About the same prices as an Apple TV or higher end Roku, and you can either use Windows, Linux, or even Android on it. Just needs a convenient remote to navigate it without needing to hook up a mouse and keyboard, or gamepad, and it would be a great little set top box.
Also I’m kind of surprised there aren’t more Linux distros for this already. We’ve got gaming console-like dedicated distros in Batocera, Lakka, RetroPi, Recall Box, etc. even stuff like SteamOS, or customized clones like Bazzite, Holo and Chimera. Where’s the TV focused OS? The closest I see are typically just running Kodi on boot, which is ok I guess, but I want something more like an all-around HTPC where Kodi is just an application I launch when I want to watch something, rather than the sole UI.
I left Plex as soon as they made it a pain to not use cloud logins.
Wtf? Why are you asking me to look g into MY system through your server? Get outta here.
That’s why I just can’t trust proprietary software anymore. Some of it is unavoidable though without making things unnecessarily hard/worse for yourself.
Shit like this gets pulled all the time, most of it is probably never discovered because it’s all hidden somewhere deep in their executables/firmware/binary blobs or whatever shit they push onto you…
OMG this is a company killer mistake. I will never use or recommend Plex. wow
This is why I don’t use Plex.
I went to install it once because I heard it was good. It said the next step of the installer is make a plex online account so I can log in. I looked for the ‘I don’t want online I want local’ option but I didn’t see one. So I uninstalled.
Nowhere did it explain what if any access Plex servers have to my media library (metadata or files), so I said no thanks I’ll just go back to using folders.
Glad to see I made the right choice.
Emby FTW.
It was clearly obvious from the very beginnings of Plex when they forked out of XBMC that they were shady and in it for the cash.
Not cool Plex, not cool.
If the software is free, you pay with your privacy
next up… docker containers start reporting user data
I’m glad I switched to Jellyfin a long time ago.