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anarchiddy

@ anarchiddy @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
2
Comments
202
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • Well, if you have an issue with people knowing you use Plex at all, then… tough luck, because I hate to tell you this, but a media server needs a client and it’s a vanishingly small group of people that will use either Plex or Jellyfin clients and not let Apple, Google, LG, Samsung or whatever other device is running the client software that this is happening.

    First:

    • not if you install these applications through fdroid or install from source
    • not if you block dns queries that report to those servers
    • not if you access the service via webURL

    but also, it's not just that they know you use plex or jellyfin, it's that they know which plex server you use and from what devices you stream from. If, for example, plex decides they want to limit the number of households can stream from a single server (like they've already done), all they'd have to do is lock or limit people's google SSO to that server. They could also report which users are associated with servers engaged in illegal activity when requested, or they could region lock their services or specific media IP's by request from copyright holders..... There's a ton of abuses that are made possible by even that tiny bit of information they share/collect.

    You might not care about it, but a lot of us do. Nobody is trying to convince you to stop using Plex, we're just trying to explain why we really do not want to use it ourselves

    And for the record I do not live in the US and the way their absolutely idiotic copyright loopholes apply here is very much in question. It doesn’t get tested in court much because the times it has been it didn’t go particularly great for copyright holders. Private copying owned media is a right regulated by law here and I will continue to do so.

    I have no idea where you live, but plex is an american company. Plex will 100% be forced to comply with copyright takedown requests, and could absolutely penalize you for infringing on american copyright law. Could you be arrested? Maybe not. But there are still a ton of ways you could get fucked because Plex has enshittified their service and has made zero commitments to protecting you or your identity.

    we are allowed to back up movies

    small thing, but in the US this is technically allowed, but as soon as you format-shift the media (e.g. rip a dvd into a digital format) it is no longer protected. It's assumed that 'backing up movies' is literally 'duplicate the media in exactly the same format it was originally purchased in'. On top of that, it's also doubly illegal to then share that media, even as a direct stream via a home server. Idk where you live but I'm actually am not aware of any country who allows for your stated use (unless you're somewhere without extradition or trade relations with the US like Russia or Cuba, because they don't give a fuck about US legal claims). Not that it's commonly prosecuted even in the US, but US companies routinely get takedown requests for that shit and Plex will absolutely throw you under the bus.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • You are actually wrong about that first assumption, I did try both at the same time and the problems with Jellyfin moved me over to Plex.

    I inferred it from this:

    Plex was one of the first things I hosted because all you have to do is installing like you would any local application and it just works

    And anyway, plex and jellyfin have different media library configuration requirements. Even if you did them at the same time, you'd have to be kind of lucky to have configured them both on the same media volume correctly without reading any of the documentation or having experience with docker ACL rules.

    Just as a for-instance (since I don't see any specifics), sharing a media volume across separated docker containers on linux requires mapping the same users and usergroups to each container. It's assumed you should know this, if you're deploying a stack of services on a server, because containers are designed to be isolated and secure - containers are restricted to accessing files in their approved ACL, so that a bad actor can't get access to a separate volume from a compromised service. One possible problem you were having (again, just a guess) is that jellyfin was assigning itself ownership of the files/folders on the media volume every time it did its scan, and Plex no longer had permission to access them. It actually doesn't matter which service was there first - as soon as you had two services accessing the same volume you would have run into this issue. It depends on how you configured both services, and if you gave them privileged access or mapped users properly, ect.

    and in fact ran just as well in a container in the NAS holding the files as it did natively on both Windows and Linux

    If you're running both services on a store-bought NAS, the problem could have also been a misunderstanding about the combined overhead requirement for the services. Without making any assumptions about how much thought you put into your configuration, I'd check that as a part of troubleshooting. But, again, seems like you don't give a fuck about troubleshooting your customized service stack and would rather use a ready-made product. That's fine.

    turns out there are plenty of applications that are pretty agnostic about running inside of a container or not, Plex included.

    Jellyfin included also. I'm not sure what the point you're making though.

    Frankly, the biggest issue of doing that, besides how redundant it is, is that Jellyfin will insist on writing a whole bunch of garbage all over your library if you want to set it up its way.

    I agree it's redundant, which is why I personally only deploy jellyfin now. As far as jellyfin writing to your media drive...... Yea, I guess that is a difference between the services. This isn't really a problem if you configure your containers correctly, but if you don't want to mess with that stuff I can see why it might be an issue for you. Plex may be storing those files on its container volume instead of the mounted media volume, or it could be storing them on their remote server (it's been a while since I had plex running), which is a fine way to do it too. There are advantages to writing it to the media volume, but I won't bore you with that

    Let alone say that if you didn’t build your car yourself you aren’t skilled enough to have one, which is the actually equivalence here.

    Good thing nobody is telling you not to have a homelab or use selfhosted services. If you want to use Plex and only want to drive automatic transmissions, go for it. Doesn't change my preference or enthusiasm for jellyfin or manual transmissions, though. And given the opportunity, i'll still passionately debate the advantages to learning stickshift and open-sourced and customizable self-hosted applications. And if you give them a try and run into problems, i'll gladly help you try to solve them if you're willing to engage with it - but if you'd rather just complain about how much my preference sucks then i'll have no problem telling you to stick with what you know next time.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • That is not a concern, though. Plex is a perfectly legal piece of software.

    There are a bunch of reasons why it might be a concern, and only the least of them has to do with the legality of copyright use.

    they assume Plex is itself a liability, which it isn’t.

    Except plex has already proven themselves willing to ban users based on their use and streaming practices, so it clearly is a liability

    It’s weird how corporate copyright assumptions have seeped to the mainstream and people assume that anything you do with your owned media is illegal unless you’re paying somebody.

    If you live inside the US (or a state with trade agreements with the US) and are ripping physical media to store on your server and stream digitally, you are absolutely breaking the law. Doubly so if you are sharing that media with others outside your household.

    'It's not a problem because I have nothing to hide' <- you are here.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • I think most of the people complaining about jellyfin being difficult either haven't tried it for at least a year or are trying to use it alongside their plex service without knowing how to configure them properly.

    Which is fair, I just didn't realize how many people were using plex that didn't have an interest in learning remote service deployment.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • I'm actually fascinated/frightened by the number of people here who are apparently comfortable running an exposed remote service on their personal network without enough tech knowledge to manage user auth themselves or maintain a stack with shared volumes....

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • I actually think most of them do, it's just that the simple designs aren't universal enough to gain much traction in a FOSS community.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • I don’t know that Google gets to log your access in that scenario, Plex is just using their login system

    Huh? Google would, at a minimum, know what service is requesting authentication, and plex would know which google user account is being used to authenticate. Maybe they hash that information, but why would anyone trust that? Even if you're not breaking any laws with what you're hosting on your plex account, I totally understand why someone might not like the idea of google or plex having data about the identities of users accessing your server and what services are being run from it.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • Ok but there are a million SSO options out there - just because someone doesn't want to allow google as a SSO provider doesn't mean they're telling anyone they have to switch fucking email services.

    If you want a remote service to handle your authentication you don't have to use google. I feel like that's something I shouldn't have to point out in a self-hosting community on an open-source and federated social media platform.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • Also, “it works on my machine” doesn’t mean it’s not a bug or a legitimate performance issue inherent to the software

    Of course not, but when there's an issue that's limited to certain users, the immediate question is "what is different about this installation that's causing this issue here and not elsewhere?". It would have been just as easy for you to start with Jellyfin instead of plex, but then you would have likely run into the same issue when trying to add plex to the same shared media volume. That isn't an uncommon issue, but when you've already said 'it's not worth my time to troubleshoot this application', I can only assume you also didn't have the time to read the documentation. That's fine - most of us here understand that homelabs are a niche hobby interest and not everyone is willing to maintain a server that requires technical knowledge and time to keep running smoothly. Some people just want something that works out of the box and don't care about it being open sourced or customizable, and that's fair. If that's why you prefer plex that's fine. But it isn't the developer's fault if you choose to go down a more complicated deployment path and find that you're out of your depth.

    It’s always crazy to me how holier-than-thou, not-the-developer’s-job people can get without heeding even the most basic, ground-level software development principles.

    Containerized applications are simply not designed to work like native applications - they are very much built with the assumption that those people who are deploying them have - at a minimum - a cursory knowledge of VM's and shared volume ACL's and a willingness to troubleshoot their configuration if there are conflicts. It isn't because they're shirking responsibility as developers, it's because they're providing source code that's designed for remote service developers to plug into other services/environments and customized. If you can't be bothered to do basic troubleshooting that's very common with shared volume deployments, then maybe you've reached your personal threshold for how much self-hosting you're willing to do. Again, that's not 'holier-than-thou', that's just an acknowledgment of what remote application deployment requires.

    Plex and jellyfin can be run together if you really wanted to do it, but if you can't be bothered to do basic troubleshooting then I won't be bothered to soothe your ego.

    I just don’t think you need to make your whole personality about your pet home server or that it needs to be finicky and annoying to work

    Lmao, idk what to tell you bud. Some people actually enjoy working on their cars, but I don't hear you getting mad at them because all you're willing to do yourself is change your oil.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • so why can I mess up a config so that the whole thing grinds to a halt?

    I actually can't tell if this is facetious or serious. There are a couple hundred (if not thousand) configuration options or reasons why your chosen setup might have caused the problem you're describing - it isn't really up to the developer to anticipate how every individual user has configured their home server, with every other application that might be sharing the same environment. It might have even been the plex service that was causing the issue.

    I ran jellyfin and plex on the same library and machine for probably a year before migrating completely away from plex without any issues, but that doesn't mean I didn't have to read a bit of the documentation to get the config right.

    I will opt out of a LOT of things on Plex before I troubleshoot that situation, I can tell you that.

    Fair enough, managing your own home server isn't for everyone.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • It may have been a bug or a config issue, but the point is it absolutely happened to me

    That's absolutely a config issue.

  • Plex now want to SELL your personal data

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  • What on earth does this even mean?

    I've never had to take jf down while managing the library.

  • 'Hetero Awesome Fest' planned for Idaho capitol during LGBTQ Pride Month

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  • He, more like hetero sausage fest

    Ayooo

    my wife came up with this

  • Sen. John Fetterman raises alarms with outburst at meeting with union officials

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  • I mean, that sounds so reductive to me, but it's the only thing that makes sense.

    He's paranoid and seeing shadows, but he supports Israel so it doesn't matter if he's losing his mind. As long as his hallucinations are telling him to vote with the major party positions, they might as well just be another staff advisor.

    I think the dems are trying hard to resist the popular momentum in the progressive side of the party, and letting his seat be re-filled would open a vulnerability. There's a small chance that a special election would cause them to lose the seat entirely, but the nationwide sentiment is in their favor - it seems to me they're more worried about a progressive challenger. But that's just speculation.

  • Sen. John Fetterman raises alarms with outburst at meeting with union officials

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  • WHY IS THIS MAN STILL IN OFFICE

    Between this and the other story earlier this week, its crystal fucking clear that he is not well. Does nobody close to him care about his clear brain damage from his stroke? It's like the entire federal government is weekend at bernie's and the whole thing is being run by staffers

  • List of Alternatives to Adobe Programs

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  • I don't use it regularly enough to weigh in comprehensively- I use it mostly for processing svg drawings created in other programs for cnc plotting, or for compiling svg drawings onto standardized layouts for sending to a printer

    My only complaint with inkscape is that it's a bit slow with rendering complex shapes/canvases with many points, but otherwise it does everything I need from a vector program.

  • List of Alternatives to Adobe Programs

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  • It's a tool that helps 'trace' a raster image into vector shapes and paths

    it's useful for creating vector artwork from raster images - sometimes a logo or icon is only available in a poor resolution raster image, and so having an easy way to convert it into vector saves a ton of time.

    I used it yesterday to create an SVG file for CNC plotting of a company logo. It would have taken me a few hours to hand-trace it myself

  • List of Alternatives to Adobe Programs

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  • Just a small thing, but as of the latest release Inkscape has a functioning live-trace tool

    It was one of the biggest things keeping me using illustrator but I used inkscape's trace yesterday and it worked great

  • Biden never pressured Israel for ceasefire, as Israeli officials boast of exploiting US support

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  • Well if it comforts you, the same analogy could be interpreted as them being 'opposites'

    Still 'of the same coin', though