[manmal]

Plex might have been stagnating, but it works kinda flawlessly for me. I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home) and even that works really well - the iOS app automagically switches between remote and local networks. Hardware transcoding (Intel) just works, even in Docker. Media scanning is very snappy. User management and parental controls look powerful enough, at least after having bought Plex Pass.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Plex might have been stagnating,

It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing software for end users that let end users set up their own person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming service.

Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on my server with their junk.

Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the liability of doubling down on their original market. Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where I am in a book, if they wanted to.

This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate source for those videos (even though just ripping them with youtube-dl is dead simple).

[thrashh]

I paid Plex for a lifetime pass a long time ago and unless something changes, I will likely never pay them again and somehow I expect more features.

So it’s not surprising they’re looking at other sources of revenue if they expect to continue paying for developers, hosting and the entire company.

I also don’t see how ripping with youtube-dl is relevant. They need a legal source from somebody, maybe with a SLA, that they can sign a contract with, not set up some hack.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> They need a legal source from somebody, maybe with a SLA, that they can sign a contract with, not set up some hack.

I'm not asking them to provide the video files.

I'm asking for the feature. And if someone doesn't understand that's what I'm asking for, then I have to conclude that what they think Plex is supposed to be is very different from what I think it's supposed to be.

That'd make me wrong, except that 10 years ago everyone who knew about Plex agreed with me. Including the original developers.

[LeFantome]

I think it is fine for Open Source software to behave as you describe. It is much more difficult for a commercial service. Any kind is service would be borderline but charging money for it pushes it over the edge in my view.

At the very least, I think you would need two entities where one creates the software and other one hosts it. That way “the service” is hosting the software and not the specific features that the software provides.

Plex mixes both and so downloading the video files becomes part of the commercial service they are offering. Providing commercial access to somebody else’s copyright sounds illegal to me.

[manmal]

Insightful points, thank you. I only don’t know about the infringement part - Hollywood seems to be the most litigative group, and Plex has them fully covered.

[Arn_Thor]

There are excellent plugins to manage audiobooks and several spectacularly good apps for playback though. Don’t know about ebooks

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Only to import metadata. But for actual functionality that's set in stone... the interface clearly believes that any audio file is music.

Hell, I have a stand-up comedy library... and if you pull up the Steve Martin album, it suggests his banjo music. You know, both audio files both Steven Martin (the man's been awarded Grammies for both, it seems).

The absolute minimum they might give us is just a different icon for audio books and for comedy. Chosen at library creation time, and no other changes. Even that's too much though.

> Don’t know about ebooks

Ebooks would require changes to the mobile clients in particular. No one's reading an ebook on Plex HTPC.

These changes aren't staggering in their complexity, they aren't horrendous endeavors. They're pretty cheap/easy. They have no interest.

[jamie_ca]

Yeah for sure on the server side it's not set up with that knowledge, and Plexamp as an audio client is very radio-music-centric, but I agree with Arn_Thor that 3rd-party clients can help bridge that gap.

I've fully switched my audiobook client on iOS to Prologue, it's as full-featured as BookPlayer (playback speeds, chapters, remembered place, sleep mode, etc) but instead of managing media on my phone manually, I'm hosting it in Plex.

[epcoa]

> I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home)

What is the benefit of running the reverse proxy vs just opening the port? It would seem whatever attacks viable on the directly opened port could just as well be carried out on the proxy port.

[manmal]

If the attack is an application layer (Plex) exploit, then yes, I'll still have a problem. But, having a reverse proxy which handles TLS handshakes does provide extra security against a lot of attacks. I trust nginx to be better hardened than the Plex server.

Also, all traffic is tunneled through wireguard and my home IP has no ports open. Since I'm behind CGNAT, my home is really hard to DDoS now. If I'm ever attacked, I'll just turn off the VPS.

Ultimately, I had the choice between paying €2/month for a fixed IPv4 at my ISP, or spend a little more (€5) on a Hetzner VPS that would also give me space for hosting some websites with a great uplink. So I went with the latter.

I will likely add CrowdSec soon which will give additional protection. To my knowledge, it's not available for Plex without a reverse proxy.

I've also contemplated using Cloudflare Zero Trust (Cloudflare Access) instead, and might yet switch to it - I just refrained from it for now because I read on Reddit that running Plex through that might be a ToS violation (streaming). I've to check the ToS and see if that's true. Also, I run a Minecraft server for my kids and their friends, which isn't compatible with Cloudflare ZT, so - I need the reverse proxy anyway.