[rolobio]

I recently canceled my Prime subscription. One of the major reasons was all the pre-roll ads. I refuse to pay, and also have to watch ads. I ripped the few shows I had purchased (they were not available on disc) before I left.

I also canceled my Hulu because of the price hike, as well as how difficult their interface is. They put things I have never watched up top, the show I would like to continue watching is several rows off screen. Very predatory.

I have moved to Plex, but will probably move off of that as they continue to poison the product.

In the end, those with physical media, and pirates win.

[pierat]

Id highly discourage Plex. They're just as predatory... and they leak all sorts of data to their servers. Who knows who'd find that valuable...

But what sort of a pie-rat would I be without a recommendation?

https://github.com/AdrienPoupa/docker-compose-nas

This sets up all the Arrs, VPN for torrenting and sends qbittorrent through VPN, and Jellyfin (media server), and loads more. Gotta configure the docker compose and paths, but it's not that bad.

I also got it to work with ProtonVPN, killswitch and all:

       protonvpn:
         container_name: protonvpn
         image: ghcr.io/tprasadtp/protonwire:latest
         init: true
         restart: always
         environment:
           PROTONVPN_SERVER: "SERVER IDENTIFIER"
           WIREGUARD_PRIVATE_KEY: "ITS PRIVATE :)"
           IPCHECK_URL: https://protonwire-api.vercel.app/v1/client/ip
           IPCHECK_INTERVAL: 60
           SKIP_DNS_CONFIG: false
           DEBUG: "0"
           KILL_SWITCH: "1"
         cap_add:
           - NET_ADMIN
         sysctls:
           net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter: 2
           net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6: 1       
         volumes:
           - type: tmpfs
             target: /tmp
         ports:
           - (fill these with ports you need to VPN so you can access the admin, like Qbittorent)
         healthcheck:
           test: ping -c 1 www.google.com || exit 1
           interval: 30s
           timeout: 10s
           retries: 3

[beAbU]

> but will probably move off of that as they continue to poison the product.

Check out Emby. Very similar to Plex (it's either an early fork or another XBMC offspring or both). I moved away from Plex because of there being persistent bugs and QoL issues that remained unfixed, but they started doing bullshit like VR apps etc. Emby seems to be laser focused on being a very good self-hosted media server + client, and nothing more. I'm a happy paying customer.

[matrss]

Emby has upset many people in the past, with their move from open source to proprietary. Jellyfin is a fork of emby that is still foss.

[juice_bus]

Recently switched off Emby to Jellyfin - having a permanent "buy premium!" in the player (auto search subtitles) sucked.

[johnnyanmac]

The joys of open source. If one day they want to close up, someone else can continue on what was open. Nice to have an evactuation plan built-in to such services in case things go rouge or the devs simply need to make decisions for themselves over the customer.

[glimshe]

I'm very happy with Jellyfin. I built my entire collection in it.

[magicalhippo]

Subtitles were mostly not working for me in Jellyfin, which makes it not very usable as a Plex replacement for us (Android TV client).

I wasn't overly pleased with the seeking either, but I could definitely live with that if subs worked, as the rest was quite nice indeed.

[glimshe]

Yeah, seeking is still a bit flaky. But subtitles work great for me, at least when using the Web and Roku clients. I got a better experience in some corner cases on the Roku client by making sure that the filenames ended with ".en.srt" so Jellyfin correctly associates them with the English language.

[magicalhippo]

Ah, my subs are mostly embedded, IIRC that's what Jellyfin has issues with.

[BHSPitMonkey]

Embedded subs worked for me in Android TV after going into the app's settings and changing the "Preferred media player" to "LibVLC (experimental)".

[beAbU]

That's not such a big deciding factor for me, and I am happy to pay for Emby. When I evaluated my move off Plex, Jellyfin was not nearly as refined as I would have liked.

I might give Jellyfin a go at some point. Since they all are children of XBMC, I assume that the metadata format is the same, meaning all my thumbnails, posters, trailers, subtitles and so on can stay in the filesystem next to the media and it'll "just work" with Jellyfin.

[avalys]

The people who win are the ones who don't let themselves get suckered into passively consuming vacuous mass-market media in the first place.

[johnnyanmac]

> get suckered into passively consuming vacuous mass-market media

As opposed to actively consuming indie media on Youtube/Tiktok/Instagram?

What's the angle here? a quip on personal productivity, or a slight against corporations for being creatively bankrupt?

[avalys]

The angle here is that there's a pervasive undercurrent in most discussions of media (and copyright, piracy, etc.) that seems to presume that consumption of music, TV shows, and movies produced by multinational corporations is as essential to human existence as food and oxygen.

I just like to remind people that you don't actually have to spend your mental energy on any of this stuff!

[poncho_romero]

Hey, _some_ of it isn’t vacuous!

[eh_why_not]

> I ripped the few shows I had purchased (they were not available on disc) before I left.

Mind sharing how (tools/setup/etc)?

I have many shows purchased there and would like to have them on disc instead.

[rolobio]

I used PlayOn. I copied the files to my Plex. I didn’t burn any to disk.

Looks like they have recently gone subscription only. I wouldn’t recommend them anymore.

The irony…

[ethbr1]

> I recently canceled my Prime subscription. One of the major reasons was all the pre-roll ads

I expect that given a choice between (a) having lots of Prime users or (b) running a successor to a cable network with ads, Amazon would very much prefer being a cable network to everyone.

[bryanrasmussen]

We noticed you followed the link to this non-Amazon product but then decided against buying, perhaps you would prefer this slightly cheaper Amazon product? Buy now and as a special bonus get no ads for the next 30 minutes!

[BirAdam]

We laugh… but this is imminent.

[walterbell]

Amazon also bought MGM.

[johnnyanmac]

>I have moved to Plex, but will probably move off of that as they continue to poison the product.

What's Plex doing? I thought the whole point was to just be a dumb way to host your own server, and then maybe charge for curation or other convenience that you can do yourself.

I have Emby because of availability (no idea why, but Emby was on my Samsung TV app store but not Plex), but its odd to hear of such a service also trying to be greedy.

[maximus-decimus]

They're turning it into a social network.

The best part is they made an update that by defaults sends e-mails your friends telling them your watch history. A feature I am sure is very well liked by all porn aficionados.

https://www.pcgamer.com/plex-says-controversial-service-that...

[Sabinus]

Plex is trying to pivot to legitimacy and become a streaming service.

[rolobio]

They push their own ad supported streaming. They continually place adult oriented recommendations where my kids can see (no matter how many times I remove them).

[dns_snek]

This is probably not what they had in mind, but Plex is still a somewhat centralized product, they recently disabled/banned all servers that were hosted on Hetzner's IP range.

[IshKebab]

Can't you skip pre-roll Prime ads? You can in the UK at least, although they have started moving their shows to "Freevee" which seems to just be ad supported Prime.

I don't think it's too big of an issue to be honest. Unlike in the 80s, streaming services now compete with bittorrent.

[lazycouchpotato]

You can skip pre-roll Prime ads, but they're introducing regular ads as well.

Gotta now fork up $3/mo in addition to your Prime subscription to get rid of ads.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/22/media/amazon-prime-video-ads/...

[bananapub]

UK is getting in-show ads next month: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2023/12/amazon-prime-...

[seoulmetro]

They offer the skip button on my Prime but it conveniently just replays the ad again if I press it.

I pay for Prime... and get ads. Sucks.

[rolobio]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Either way I won’t play.

[polishdude20]

I noticed Spotify does this as well for some podcasts. Like the literally personalize an audio ad to my location and it's part of the audio of the podcast.

[samtho]

This has been a thing for years for non-Spotify podcasts. Podcast CDNs inject ads at the behest of the publisher (or the ad network provides the CDN) and will mint a new audio file for each region as it’s downloaded.

Automatically injected ads are also prone to failure and either a bug in the system or a misconfiguration by the producer of a podcast can result in some broken audio including skipping forward, backwards, creating a long tail of dead air, or (most egregiously) cut it many minutes short often enough to miss a significant chunk of the ending.

Automatic advertisement injection is a huge scourge on podcast listening, not because of the ads, but how broken it ends up being in practice.

[polishdude20]

Especially knowing that it's double-dipping by the podcaster.

[beej71]

They must have done the math, though, and decided that the loss of people like us was covered by the additional ad revenue.