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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I am the Plex guy in my group of friends and family. I think there’s probably a bit of confirmation bias at play. Being on Lemmy alone puts you into a niche area of Internet already, which is going to make hearing about geeky things like home labs more common.
So yes, they exist.
I am Plex Guy, my friend is Plex Guy, between the 2 of us we share our servers to over a dozen people. My mom and grandma use my server in another state, I don’t charge anyone access. In total I have 8 users on my server, my friend has probably the same on his, with both of us giving access to a different friend meaning he has access to double the amount of content.
I got absolutely fed up with subscription services raising prices and removing content (I only ever had Hulu and Netflix) so I just built my own service. My only subscription now is a Tidal family plan for myself, my wife and my mom.
Also it’s interesting how between these 2 servers, they’re built differently. I built mine using TrueNAS and housed it in a dedicated PC case large enough for all the drives, my buddy made his as a Windows server, and has everything wall mounted with custom 3D printed brackets.
Also, when I go to Brazil for vacation, my content isn’t region locked, it’s at home in a box on my living room that I just access with no VPN or any bullshit needed.
In a lot of countries, you could legally share copyrighted content to your “private and relative” circle. So it’s not actually illegal. Your theory seems correct, even if we do have ftp-siblings too
I’m a Plex guy. I share my library because it’s a bit of fun and scratches my IT interest itch. I actually run Plex and Jellyfin in parallel but pretty much everyone prefers the Plex interface (and most smart TVs have it ready to go, even the silly ones with off brand app stores).
Mostly it’s just an excuse to play with cool toys, and a reason to work out how to run things I wouldn’t otherwise bother with.
I’ve always downloaded stuff, since the dialup days. Originally it was for things that were region locked / “unrated” in Australia and thus not available… but now it’s just so much more convenient than paid options that it’s a no-brainer. Like I literally can’t pay any legit service for the level of access and convenience I have now.
It’s not even about money anymore. Between the purchase price and power consumption of my dual Xeon rack server and JBOD, the 1000/400Mbps fibre connection, and the time I spend on it I’m paying enough to cover half a dozen subscriptions or so with change… But the convenience! I can watch anything, anywhere, on any device. No jumping between services to find stuff, no episodes/movies going missing, no login restrictions, no player that won’t work because your HDMI cable is lacking a decimal place or whatever the hell they’re doing now.
Anytime someone we know in real life complains about having issues with their legitimate streaming service I offer access to Plex. I think there’s 40ish users, but only a dozen or so that use it with any real frequency. Maybe 4-5 concurrent streams at peak times, outside of that is usually occasionally the work from home “workers” / the night shift people, or me streaming music at work or similar. I think the most I’ve had is 7 or 8 at once.
I’m a jellyfin guy. I share with roughly 6 friends just for fun.
I have a Plex guy. He runs a server and invites anyone he considers a friend, but also gives access to most who ask. He has a giant rig that costs him a lot in electricity bills. But he doesn’t mind and doesn’t want any money, because he’s a sweet person and it’s just something he does.
Edit: I’m in Europe; also he always honors requests.
I was the Plex guy until all my non-paying family members embraced being fascist dicks. Enjoy paying $200/month in shitty subscriptions, dicks.
Hell yeah, ethical Plex guy!
I am a Jellyfin server guy, and I Iet family and friends use it for free. I also am not shy about telling people that I do this, as I don’t see any moral issue with it and will happily defend piracy as not only completely fine, but a net moral good. I see it as a tiny bit of anarchist calisthenics.
I would probably be this guy if I ever got around to doing the research into how to make my Jellyfin available over the internet safely.
If you haven’t heard of it, tailscale is great for this. You can create a VPN with all of your self hosted stuff for you to access from anywhere, plus you can share specific machines with other users.
I’m really trying to avoid using for-profit 3rd parties. CURRENTLY I could sign up as a free user and probably be fine. But Tailscale could wake up any day and decide to start charging, or put restrictions on the free tier that would force me to a paid tier.
Part of the reason I bought a Blu-Ray drive, some big HDD’s, and started collecting discs in the first place was to take back control from tech companies. It’s why I chose Jellyfin over Plex. Going with Tailscale would defeat the principal.
Fair enough, you could always manage your own VPN to accomplish the same goal. I didn’t want to deal with the headache of authentication or dealing with keys, so something like tailscale is perfect.
I’m a plex guy and I know a bunch of other plex guys. There is dozens of us!
Me and a relative jointly host and manage a server. Over the years we’ve slowly allowed in a handful of trusted friends and family. By now we probably have 20ish connected. Most use it as a supplement to their main streaming services, primarily used for exclusive content like the star wars shows. Some, like those of us hosting, have cancelled every streaming service and use it exclusively.
Yes, there’s even a subreddit dedicated to people advertising their Plex servers. Lots of them are paid, it’s wild.
What sub? Divisions by zero, the piracy Lemmy instance, is very against paid plex shares and I think bans it.
Apologies, I meant on Reddit.
I thought the sub communities here were called Sublemmys :p
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.
I really need a better *arr setup. Mine keeps breaking with the VPN setup and indexers that don’t find shit
Seems like a good way to implement massively distributed piracy. The comapnies can’t possibly make a case against all of them, there are too many. I like it.
Why should they not be able to do that…? Even if there are 100’000?
Well for starters, those 100k would be spread all over legal jurisdictions, like even different countries. So you would need a representative certified to practice law in each of those jurisdictions. And of course the laws are different, so each case would be different. And the people you are suing have relatively little money to pay in compensation. The number of people needed to pull that off would be so high that the cost would be drastically larger than the potential financial gains. And since the board of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, they would have to put a stop to it. The shareholders care little for the long term potential gains of such an enormous expense.
I think you massively underestimate how much money you can make with cease and desist cases. And how little it costs to send letters in bulk to people it could apply to.
You can trick people into paying… but if you are talking people who pirate media, your sucess rate will be pretty low. Legally, cease and desist letters do nothing on thier own other than prove you notified them. Any free defense lawyer would argue that thier client didn’t believe the sender had any right to make the request, and the send provided no legal proof. But again, even ifnthey could get say 100k from each person running one of these. It wouldn’t pay they law firm bills, not even close. It would be a major expense.
These are copy and paste letters, they take a few minutes per case top. You act as if once such letter costs more than a freaking murder case defense.
What do you think happens when you get such a letter and argue like that? They just drop the ball?
You don’t have to respond to the letter at all. That’s my point. It has virtually no meaning other then to allow them to say “I told you so” in court. And for that to have any meaning, they would have to show that you knew the letter came from the legit rights owner. Since the name is likely something none of us have actually heard of, you could argue you didn’t think it was legit. But to even get to that point they have to file a suit and pay lawyers and all that. I can send you a cease and desist letter claiming the right to tell you to stop doing anything I want. It’s just a scare tactic. Plenty of companies have been caught sending them when they had no legal right to make the demand. Most pirates know this, and will just ignore it.
You do not have to respond to any invoice you get. And of course that tends to end up in court. What makes you think you could win the case? Just that perhaps they did not actually have the rights in the first place and thus it does not go any further than some letters? How often does that happen? 1 % of all such cases? Do you have the number?
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.
I spent forever looking for Mythbusters on DVDs, the only 2 DVDs I ever found were “collections” and not seasons. So weird they don’t want my money.
Good Eats radicalized me too. Not for plex but for cooking.
Yeah, everyone in my family has cooked professionally for at least a few years. My wife’s family lived off of microwaved food. As I was teaching her that food could have flavor, she started asking questions about cooking that were easier to answer with a clip from good eats. Eventually, I went looking for a boxed set of it, and one hadn’t been released. So I spent the $600 I was willing to spend on it on a server.
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
Oh I see, thank you
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.
Ah OK, TIL
Did you find a good source for good eats? The only one I found was low quality TV rips.
I grabbed the low quality complete rip, and have sonarr set to upgrade episodes. Even a decade later, I think I still have a few 480p/720p episodes.
I don’t do any of this stuff, but it’s really interesting to me.
Do you mean that sonarr is always looking for a better version of content you already have, and that over time your library gets upgraded? that’s pretty cool. Can you specify versions in your “shopping list”, like the special edition or director’s cut or even a VHScopy?
Generally it looks for a higher resolution. Sonar also has the ability to look for anything listed for a show in tvdb’s “specials”. That’s usually things like extended cuts of episodes, or interviews.
Interesting, thank you. sounds like a pretty well developed set of tools.
Usenet
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.
