MudMan

I think your read on what people typically do with Plex probably doesn’t align with reality. I also think in the end you’re way less optimistic about the potential of open source software than I am. There are multiple areas where OSS options are either dominant or very competitive, but I am also clearly way less picky about how that gradient of openness to commerciality than you are. We can agree that it’s fine that there are options for both or all steps in that gradient, but there is a ton of snark and all-or-nothing attitude in that community as well.

I will say that If you have a commercial option like Plex and a couple of open alternatives (say Kodi and Jellyfin for the sake of argument) I would prefer one of those to have the type of UX that can compete with the closed commercial product because you can compete with open alternatives.

If jellyfin adopted HA’s model of paid development, I’d be thrilled. But HA’s strategy is actually pretty unique, it’ll take time for that structure to be stress-tested and propagate.

Well, hey, there we agree, then. I’d say that the setup for HA is actually fairly Mozilla-like, and people don’t seem thrilled with THAT, so it wasn’t a given you’d agree. Plex certainly isn’t that. For one thing it’s commercial and closed source. But crucially HA’s commercial branch WILL have a bunch of your data, including voice processing and login info, if you do buy into their paid subscription service.

As for the rest of the argument, most is redundant so I’m not gonna go through the loop again, I am actually busy. But I will add a few things. For one thing, whether I think FOSS is worth “any level of inconvenience” is irrelevant. I do, and I do live with the inconvenience in some cases. But if the goal is for FOSS to be mainstream and a primary choice (and it can absolutely be, there are plenty of examples), then it doesn’t matter what I think. The reason the privacy tradeoffs make sense for Plex is that Plex is an app your family is likely to use. Mine does, and they sure won’t put up with bad UX for the sake of using an open alternative. OBS didn’t crush Xsplit out of the market because of ideology, it did it because it became more powerful, usable and reliable.

And let me clarify I don’t “blow smoke for Plex”. I opened this whole subthread by saying I wanted to use Jellyfin (hence all the testing we’ve been nitpicking about) but couldn’t justify it. I’ve said this above. I’d drop Plex in a heartbeat if Jellyfin was just as good to use for me and the rest of my household. But it isn’t. There’s no reason to blow smoke for Plex, but there is a reason to not delusionally pretend that open source alterantives are better than they are. You’re not going to gaslight normies into using them that way and the complacency just makes it less likely for them to succeed at what they’re trying to do. It is, after all, the year of Linux desktop.

I mean, my Plex server is on a Fedora machine, it seems to be doing fine. I have gotten into arguments here about how frustrating it is that Linux advocates pretend every usability problem for Windows users is solved and that “just use Mint” is a valid solution to that issue. If you want to know how that goes, it goes a lot like this conversation.

On topic, using any external login or remote access third party service for your self hosted services is a significant change in how much info is not controlled by you, nobody is arguing that. There’s a conversation to be had about whether that’s worth it for most users. Like I said earlier, is it a good thing for Home Assistant to provide a paid subscription service that will handle that for you? For most people I’d say yes, it’s still a much safer, more flexible alternative to Google’s or Amazon’s ecosystem, so why not? Baby steps.

But if you’re already using a commercial service that already has a proprietary login then no, it doesn’t matter. Plex already knows which clients go to your server. It does not need Google for anything here, having Google’s SSO doesn’t give them any information they already have. It does give that to Google, but if your concern is the cops are going to bang on your door for all your illegal pixels that you stream then you’re just as boned. It’s borderline irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

As for the “I have nothing to hide” thing… look, if you want to have this argument with someone else go pester them instead. It’s not “I have nothing to hide”, it’s “this commercial service that I use does something that is legal and I intend to both take advantage of that and defend my right to own my media”. How you get “I have nothing to hide” out of that is your own pretzel logic.

I have a right to store, backup and access my own media and to keep a copy of it for private use. I will exercise that right regardless of how many US corpos pretend that hey own the very concept of showing video to people. I am doing nothing illegal here and of the perfectly legal software options to do this perfectly legal thing I chose the one that had better usability for my family to be comfortable using it. This comes at the cost of an external service storing some of our data, just like our Netlfix and Disney+ subscriptions do, but since I’m not keeping a media server performatively that is a tradeoff we have made on a bunch of places because not everybody who lives here is willing to do homework to be able to use their devices. That cool with you?

For the record, I don’t have any misgivings about FOSS as a concept. I do have remarkable contempt for people who want it to keep being a minority option because they like being in the secret treehouse and don’t want everybody else learning about it. Widespread, successful FOSS doesn’t look like half-baked UX and hobbyist programmers working for nothing in their spare time, and I would certainly like to see a landscape where alongisde hobby projects we have a solid stable of financially sustainable professionally made open source alternatives that anybody can get into. Jellyfin isn’t even the worse offender here. If nothing else it’s frustrating because it could be a more approachable sustainable alternative in the vein of your Blenders or Home Assistants… but it’s kinda not, and that sucks.

You are saying many things about the legality of this, especially internationally and regarding what Plex is or isn’t obligated to do, that are a bit of a stretch. But man, are they put in context by the admission of left wing cosplay there at the end where you concede you do think “a little bit of crime is good, actually”, which explains a lot of the hack the world mentality and why you feel so cool and dangerous by sharing some torrents you got with a slightly larger group of people than your direct family.

I still do think that’s counterproductive if you ever want a scenario where the late-capitalist media distribution landscape gets at least a modicum of competition from more reasonable and sustainable alternatives. That you prefer to feel edgy than to propose a viable scenario for that is all well and good, but I wish you didn’t feel the need to do that at people.

For the record, you are still wrong about SSO. Again it makes sense that if you’re cosplaying cops and robbers “this thing bad, this thing bad, both together worse” sounds reasonable, but if you really were at risk of any real legal liability that’s really not how that would play out. In the real world ANY leak of that information from any source would be an absolute problem. So the Google login could be a problem by itself, and the Plex data gathering would be a much bigger problem by itself, but both together would just mean you are exactly as screwed as with just one.

But you think it’s cool to crap on Google (which I guess it is) and are cosplaying, so that’s a cool thing to perform outrage about even if it doesn’t really matter in this scenario. Which I’m increasingly realizing is all this conversation is about, from the “I’m so good at networking and system administration” braggadocio to the “I’m such a dangerous anarchist criminal that doesn’t give a crap about the rules because I’m so good they can’t catch me” stuff.

FWIW, I do care about self-hosting as a viable commercial alternative and about a legal framework to support it, but even if I didn’t think it was possible (which it is, and some people at least are working along those lines) I am not ready to give up on the changes required to get there just to feel cool on the Internet. You do you, though, just… try not to scare the normies away. Not that there are any normies around here anyway, so I guess we’re safe on that front.

Man, you keep thinking that taking digs about how it’s all a skill issue is either an argument or an insult, and I keep reminding you that even if there was a skill issue at play (and there wasn’t), being hard or annoying to use is the actual problem. If your UX allows for skill issues in making a straightforward setup run then it’s a UX issue.

Also, me using Plex to host copies of my own media legally is not the same as operating a P2P service. But if it’s any consolation I have no intention to set foot on that hellhole anyway, given that US authorities seem to not need copyright overreach to throw you in a room with no windows indefinitely these days. Good luck with that.

Oh, and yes, those are mutually exclusive. Or mutually inclusive, to be more accurate. If your concern is the govenrment overreach implications of having a portion of your data leaked, worrying about a smaller leak along the way of actively generating a larger leak is entirely pointless. Conversely, I’d argue that if you have a dozen users and are terrified that the cops are going to come and raid the… I’m gonna say meth lab you’re running on the side, we’re back to the conversation about how cool you are with that dozen users having their Jellyfin clients running on a bunch of Android devices, Smart TVs, Windows boxes or whatever else.

Again, I keep struggling with the irony of this weird position having entirely bought into the narrative that self-hosting media is inherently illegal or dangerous. I came into this argument from the UX angle, you guys are increasingly convincing me that a significant disincentive for self-hosting to become mainstream is that its entire community is convinced that they are doing something wrong, apparently. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed how central to the whole thing a bunch of P2P-specific paraphernalia happens to be, but I wasn’t ready for the gatekeeping to come with a side of edgy 90s we’re-so-bad hack-the-world stuff.

I think you’re giving their ability to coordinate too much credit. Best guess the ISPs are just withholding anything that requires investment to deploy or that they can monetize themselves. Everybody else is just bottom-feeding by selling workarounds wherever the ISPs can’t or won’t.

The invisible hand of the market sucks at creating optimal solutions, but it does great at creating scammy crap that will take your money, no conspiracy necessary.

I am glad you don’t. Not that I’d pay you for therapy. I mean, no offense, but your bedside manner is terrible, you’ve lost your shit multiple times and you keep trying to pass double bind crap as reasonable arguments in decidedly toxic ways. You’re a 5/10 opinionated online interlocutor, but a 3/10 therapist at best.

I have absolutely not been willfully misreading. You can’t argue that the guy saying he has a problem with Google’s sign-in specifically has a point and also say that the data mining happening within Plex is WAY more intrusive. If the point is whether giving Google this data is a problem it must be worse than using any of the other sign-in options. But it isn’t. Your data is as widely available one way or the other. It is reasonable to think Plex’s visibility over your server is too much, I accept that, particularly if your use case runs afoul of their EULA…

…but then you can’t tell me “I don’t trust Google”, unless your argument is you trust Plex more for some reason. Which you shouldn’t. It just doesn’t follow.

Oh, and they do sell your data for advertising. There’s an opt-in for it, though. Since we’re talking about legality, it’d be a punishable offense for them to sell your data without your consent, which is why that’s there, and they do need to tell you what data they collect if you request it.

And no, I am not liable under US law. There is a treaty that requires both parties to meet those requirements, but US law isn’t directly applicable over here. What is applicable is our own legislation made to comply with those trade agreements. Which includes exemptions for private copy.

As far as I and every piece of legal advice I’ve seen about this knows, anyway. If you have a source for how apparently US law is directly applicable to any country they have a trade agreement with feel free to point me to this insane new paradigm of international law, though.

Why do you think I didn’t look at what the default settings were? I mean, I told you a bunch of times I went as far as getting into bug reports mentioning similar symptoms, you think I just didn’t click the checkmark for “don’t turn your computer into a doorstop”?

I didn’t change any defaults I didn’t need to and I didn’t have a complicated task for it (and let’s be honest, if I did you’d be here telling me that it’s user error for trying to make it do complicated things). That doesn’t mean I didn’t set it up.

But yes, absolutely, a self-hosted open source app is supposed to guess what my setup is. At least as much as its paid competitor. Because that’s my entire point, UX matters and being open source is no excuse for your UX sucking, people are just going to use whatever works best. All the well intentioned whining about security and independence in the world won’t beat UX. So if you want more OSS get OSS devs to focus on usability.

But hey, I do appreciate the honesty of admitting this defense of Jellyfin’s UX is not about Jellyfin’s UX being as good as Plex’s, it’s an ideological argument independent from UX.

Which is fine, I share your goals. I want Jellyfin to be bigger than Plex.

But for that it needs to be as good as Plex. Or better. And it isn’t.

I’ve been vague about the details because you are digging your heels into an argument about a one week test run I did a while ago on a piece of software that didn’t do what I wanted. “My use case” was “go in there and scrape my video library” on a default install.

The reason I even tried to plug in live IPTV, by the way, is that people made a big deal of Plex’s obsession pushing for it, since they plug it in by default and have their own default list of channels pre-baked. Even if I don’t use it much on Plex, and I really don’t, it was an interesting test case for how the two pieces of software handle their extra options. For all the crap Plex got for trying to become Netflix, and I do agree it’s a fool’s errand, it was a depressing reminder of how commercial software and OSS often handle UX differently.

Oh, and if the implication is that Jellyfin got itself a better default skin, then good for them, but I saw the interface not that long ago and it still looked pretty grim. And yeah, screw them for letting me customize it. That’s bad. Entirely reskinning software is a bad feature that adds next to nothing but complexity if you have good designers make a good UI in the first place. It’s fine to have as an extra, but it should either be very well packaged or waaaay out of the way for power users. The average user shouldn’t have to think about it. Turning on dark mode, maybe, and even that would be a disappointing omission of a “take system setting” option as a default. UX IS important.

And no, I refuse to concede that self-hosting entails annoying, convoluted setups. There are multiple commercial solutions to this that are different degrees of “better than nothing”. At ground level plenty of routers or self-hosted products will one-click set up a VPN for you, which is not great but at least works around the issue. On the other end it’s a remote service provider managing your remote access and then yeah, there’s data form you leaking elsewhere, but that as an option is at least useful. It’s not just pure corpo closed source like Plex, either. Home Assistant’s for-profit arm will gladly take your subscription money and handle remote access for you. Whether you trust them more or less than Google (or not at all and want to set up yourself) is up to you.

Also, again, I checked this a while ago, but given how many other people are up and down this thread claiming (and not being disputed) that Jellyfin is still less fire-and-forget for parsing, I don’t know how “outdated” that is. You should ping the two separate people who recommended third party software to scrub media libraries so they’d work with Kodi/Jellyfin and explain to them that this is now entirely unnecessary.

And I didn’t say that ebooks were “a basic UX block” (although it sucking did make me go for a Plex/Komga setup, not a Plex/Jellyfin setup, so… I guess it is on that front). I gave you a list. I’m not going back to Jellyfin just to verify that you’re obviously wrong about it all having been perfectly fixed up to Plex’s standards, because I’m pretty sure the bunch of people saying the opposite all over this thread aren’t making it up.

UX matters. Jellyfin’s UX is much, much worse than Plex’s. I wish it wasn’t, but it was bad enough when I tried it to push me away and a whole bunch of people here are claiming the same thing. Being delusional about the quality of the implementation doesn’t make it better.

You are correct, I don’t care about any of that either. And I know about the boilerplate. Bud.

You need to agree with yourself about what you’re arguing. Are you saying that the problem is the SSO or Plex?

Because if Plex will go tell on you it will do it based on the data they have internally, not based on any data captured by the login flow, so the SSO is not additional issue compared to using Plex without the Google login and using the email login instead.

And if you’re arguing that the SSO is the problem and not Plex which you indignantly reminded me is what the thread was about, then you’re arguing against yourself, because it sure seems we agree that if Plex is going to take any action against you illegally sharing files through their system (which, by the way, they are legally obligated to do) it won’t be due to the Google login at all, which is just a bit of convenience and doesn’t seem to provide anybody with any data they don’t already have.

Once again, you are super keen on playing up hypotheticals. Once again, the biggest issue with those hypotheticals is that Plex boots me out… of Plex. I am not doing anything illegal with it or even breaching their EULA, including the paragraphs you quote (not that something being written down in an EULA makes it applicalbe, but still). I will bite that bullet and live with Jellyfin’s implementation if and when that happens. Which it likely won’t.

No, the bans stem from the EULA. I am not breaching the EULA. Whether Plex can verify that or not is not much of a concern for me.

But to be clear, I have zero to lose here. The outcome of Plex banning me for not breaking their EULA (for some reason, which is technically possible but unlikely) is the exact same as the outcome of me dropping Plex in case they ban me. In both cases the only thing that happens is I’m not using Plex anymore.

Also, in your hypothetical Plex already knows the stuff you are worried about. The SSO has nothing to do with it. Plex doesn’t need data from Google to know, they already have your personal information.

I guess adding to the list of reasons to use Plex “being berated by online randos wanting to be performatively tech savvy”. Which, again, changes nothing practical, but hey.

I’m very confused about why you’d assume user error is more likely, given the setup.

But to your other question, if it WAS user error, then it’s Jellyfin’s fault. Why should it be possible for the user to erroneously set the software so that scanning a library would grind the whole thing to a halt? I mean, it wasn’t user error, but in what world is allowing the user to set up a simple library scrape in a way that breaks the functionality of the entire thing an acceptable implementation? A bug I can understand, but that’s just bad.

Also just bad, from my recollection, Jellyfin’s interface to add live TV channels, its overcustomizable tools for skinning (which are needed because the base skin is pretty plain), the convoluted requirements for remote access, the overly strict library parsing paired with the default choice being to keep data stored within the library (for portability, I suppose? It’s ugly and annoying and messy). I briefly tried to get books working on it before giving up and that also sucked, but it was a while ago and I forget the details.

You can get as condescending as you want, but those are all major UX blockers for key use cases. Google’s SSO is the least of it, but I guess it’s an easy deflection if you don’t want to acknowledge any usability gaps at all despite all evidence.

And don’t get me wrong, I get that Jellyfin is free software and Plex will charge you and advertisers at any opportunity because it is not. But ultimately I use the software that works. I may prefer a free alternative, because who doesn’t, but that’s not a get out of jail free card. Particularly when the choice isn’t just for myself.

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

No you are not. This thread straight up opens on “why would anybody use Plex” and this whole branch is about how people don’t want anybody using Google for login.

You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I’ll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals. They are, though, so I don’t particularly mind.

Especially because we’ve moved from “oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in” to “actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering”.

Friend, if people’s relatives were willing to install their Plex client from source they wouldn’t need anybody to host a Plex server for them. What the hell are you going on about and how detached are you from how people use software?

I swear, online… man, “posers” is so harsh, but I can’t find a better word. They always pretend they are running some top secret off-the-grid operation like big corpo is coming after them specifically. Your data is probably not that tightly kept (mostly because a bunch of it probably doesn’t depend on you) and it’s not that much of a priority.

Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.

Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway because the rules being sought are absurd and holders know it and they just want scary tools to wave in front of individual users and to actually deploy against major sharers. You are playing out this weird scenario where a company goes to Plex to get your name as if Plex doesn’t have a business built on helping you do the thing you think they’re chasing you for and has a ton more money they could be sued for. It’s nonsense. The reality of it is it makes you feel cool and savvy to secure your home computer as if it held state secrets.

And that’s fine, but don’t act like anything else is insanity. It’s kind of obnoxious.

Man, you’re really itching to talk shop about specifics and complexities and it really isn’t about that.

The guy said “why does anybody still consider Plex” about the slightly misleading privacy policy excerpt and a bunch of us pointed out UX and accessibility are reasons. This entire tangent spawns from me claiming I had technical issues on top of the UX stuff and you being super excited to assume it’s a skill issue and maybe get to troubleshoot a bit.

Except it wasn’t, I’m not particularly interested and the technical issues weren’t even the primary reason I moved to something else.

For what it’s worth, I barely remember what the setup was when I messed around with Jellyfin because I move things around a bunch and despite this conversation suddenly hinging on it, I didn’t think much of it beyond “oh, this sucks, I guess I’ll just do Plex instead”. It was almost certainly not Plex and Jellyfin running simultaneously on two containers sharing resources, though. I have way too many loose computers bouncing around the house for this not to have been some test run natively installing it on whatever I had lying around, which is also why the Plex server I have now has been on three different machines since then (and is still running natively because why the hell not, being adamant that everything needs to be on some overdone docker setup is just nerds being nerds).

Look, I respect your hobbies, but I reserve the right to find you extremely annoying when you try to patronize people who are actually trying to get shit done just because you’re excited at the opportunity to exlpain the difference between a bind and a volume at someone whether they need the explanation or not. The reality of it is if you want to be nerdy and all hobbyist about having a home server (I fully reject the term “lab”) that rabbit hole goes deep. You have tons of runway to go nuts about dedicated server hardware and networking software while letting people who just kinda want to be able to open their media without having to plug in a physical drive do their thing.

Jellyfin doesn’t HAVE to be complicated. It’s not good that it is. All this tier of software that does useful stuff to replace corporate subscription crap doesn’t need to be any harder to use and maintain than your average Windows application. Everybody would benefit from a concerted effort to take the faff out of it. And I pinky promise that you’ll still have a lifelong hobby if and when that happens.

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.

I give zero craps about whether Google knows I or anybody else uses Plex via their login because they already know this form the Google Play Store, along with the manufacturer of every TV we collectively own.

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. If a corporation wants to deliberate with our local courts whether my owning a drive that happens to not be super picky about on-disc DRM I don’t have anything particularly intense going on this week.

Ironically, in our own dumb legal implementation we are allowed to back up movies but there is a carved exception for software, so making a copy of a game you own is a bigger deal. Go figure.

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. Plex never had an issue handling my remote library at any point, 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, so it was surprisingly easy to see what combination of placing files and software worked better for me.

Which I guess is a good segue to your second point, because hey, turns out there are plenty of applications that are pretty agnostic about running inside of a container or not, Plex included. And there are several implementations of easy self-hosted apps that will set up a container for you. Unfortunately most of those are commercial software trying to monetize self-hosting, and snobbish hobbyists seem to have no particular urgency for beating corporations to that particular punch.

And yes, you can run Plex and Jellyfin together. I don’t know what that point is supposed to add to this. You can mostly run any software alongisde any other software. 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. Plex will mostly tolerate this and keep chugging along, though, so it’s not a dealbreaker if you don’t mind.

And absolutely you can make a hobby out of self-hosting or whatever else, but the point is car nuts typically don’t hold the opinion that nobody should be having cars but them. I mean, there’s plenty of car snobbery, and a bunch of people will say they prefer a manual transmission car over an automatic, but it’s a pretty extreme position to hear someone say if you can’t drive stick you shouldn’t have access to cars. Let alone say that if you didn’t build your car yourself you aren’t skilled enough to have one, which is the actual equivalence here.

I have a password manager.

My parents do not.

They do have a Gmail account and know how to use Netflix, so they know how to use Plex.

I mean, that’s not the dealbreaker, there are plenty of bigger issues with Jellyfin than not having a Google authentication integration. They definitely can log in with a password and do for other self-hosted services, but the fact is that Plex having the option does remove one annoyance from the process.

Yeah, you kinda got to the breakdown in this conversation. Google sure knows that you’re using Plex.

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

I think people are taking me saying “Google doesn’t know what you’re streaming with Plex, but Plex does, so that’d be a bigger issue” as irrelevant because they assume Plex is itself a liability, which it isn’t.

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.

it isn’t really up to the developer to anticipate how every individual user has configured their home server,

Yes, it is.

People keep answering the question of “why would anybody still use Plex” in this thread much better than I ever could.

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

Also, also, spare me the condescension, I self-host a dozen different things, including other open source libraries for non-video stuff, closed source libraries for other other non-video stuff and increasingly more-trouble-than-it’s-worth networking.

But even if I didn’t, 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. By the time it’s living in a container inside a dedicated home server or whatever you are well past the entry level for this stuff. If that’s the gap you find acceptable between Plex and Jellyfin you have, again, found your answer to why a whole bunch of people would consider one and not the other.

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. Self hosting has tons of potential and it’s one of the few areas where open source solutions dominate the field. Somebody should take some time to make it actually accessible before the commercial hounds smell blood in the enshittified waters and turn it into a product all the way.

Kudos to Home Assistant for soooort of doing that, although I still think it’s a bit overcustomizable and overengineered. Still the closest to a good self-hosted open application out there by a mile, though.