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Piracy ends when content is offered in a convenient fashion. It’s always been this simple and always will be. Naturally, rich and out of touch people want to believe that more authoritarianism is the solution, because they got rich through their contempt for humanity, so why should this be any different?
The thing is, as we learned with Netflix (and… everything lately), even if it starts off convenient and reasonable, that will last only long enough that they think they’ve cornered the market. So unless something changes to guarantee an ongoing reasonable proposition, i will never trust them again.
Fully agree.
Yes, i’ll be very weary of giving up the control I have through physical drives and jellyfin for some shiny new thing that will never last. Fool me once… etc. etc.
Here is how I see Piracy ending. We’re offered Netflix and forgot about streamers so the government went heavy handed and forced other governments to change all their laws and give up these pirates while seizing sites.
Even though there are smaller pirates, the leaders of it so are mortality wounded killing any progress. We eventually end up with cable television 3.0 and try to go back to piracy. However while we weren’t looking there’s a ton of new laws and tools and ability to stop it that was created while we were watching umbrella academy.
Now the final nail is using media to create a foot-in-the-door technique where media convince the public to hate a new thing. Once that zeitgeist is established laws will then slowly be created by as suggested by lobbyists which are really just a facade that would give more power to take out pirates.
All this does is make me more interested in “pirating” their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it’s making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
Jellyfin pased my spouse test for local network.
I put her on tailscale for remote access but she’s not a big fan of that.
Why not having your own wireguard endpoint at home? Then you could additionally filter ads using adguard at home and on the go.
I have tailscale at home I could use an exit node. My family doesn’t want ad blocking because then they don’t get their ads for their free to play games.
Honestly the biggest reason not to use VPN home for everything as every time you swap cell phone towers your IP changes and you renegotiate. It’s not so bad when I’m using something that buffers, so it’s also not so bad when I’m driving, but when a passengers loading a website or playing a game with ads and the ads which are already 30 seconds take an extra 30 seconds to load they get all grumpy.
It’s good thinking though I have totally tried to sell people on that
I am constantly connected to my VPN at home if my iPhone is not connected to a WiFi in white list, and I use an IP white list, including DNS, to go through the tunnel and I play no adware games 😂I guess that is why it works so well for me.
But nice to know why VPN on phone behaves like it does if you route everything through it. I think have experienced that before, when I forgot to disable the third party VPN I use to spoof location.
The VPN keeps a constant network connection open. It’s job isn’t just to encrypt the traffic and route the traffic home but also to make sure that there’s no man in the middle activity going on.
Each cell phone tower you are connected to provides you with a new IP. In most cases cell phone towers are less than 2 miles apart. While you’re driving or taking a train or just about any other form of transportation that means you’re going to change IP addresses every couple of minutes. If you’re not connected to a VPN it’s a couple dozen milliseconds to change that IP and start talking to a new tower. But once you throw VPN in the mix your VPN says hey you’re IP changed sorry we need to renegotiate. You send your SSL key up and you’re off It checks it against your SSL key and the other side and rebuilds a new connection. In the best of circumstances this goes pretty quickly. But not quickly enough for certain tasks. Buffering video is fine. Remote screen connections, SSH terminals, anything else that’s extremely on demand underperforms horribly.
Same, mine passed the test. But used only locally.
Is it not safe to expose externally with ssl yet?
I’m not worried about SSL. I’m worried about a rapidly developed open source project with lots of changes and lots of cooks in the kitchen. All it takes is a buffer overflow and one of a thousand libraries they’re using. I don’t know that they have a dedicated security team or even anyone really looking at that.
I wouldn’t be so worried but it needs to have access to my media which is outside of my DMZ.
And I don’t want to put my media into my DMZ.
I put through the reverse proxy and so far I haven’t had any issues
Same. Wish the world had already adopted ipv6
You can always use the older, well established, actively developed, and stable project that Jellyfin is built from; Emby. (Jellyfin is literally Embys code from 10+ years ago)
Yea no. FUCK Emby and their bullshit, Emby is the next Plex and not in a good way. I was there 10 years ago when Jellyfin split off, so AFAIC there are only 2 viable streaming software, Plex and Jellyfin. Emby is dead to me.
I’m curious to know why you think/feel that way.
I found/started using personal streaming solutions around 8 years ago; so post-Emby/MediaBrowser split into Jellyfin.
While I started with Plex, I very quickly came to despise their always online/centralized authentication system and moved to Emby as the only alternative I’d seen/heard of at the time. From there I learned of Jellyfin and (at least some of) it’s origins; though I’ve had 0 reason/need/desire to actually install Jellyfin as Emby works fantastically.
I’ve been really quite happy with Emby; particularly with their stance of not tracking/collecting userdata and maintaining Emby as a private company focused on their customers instead of investors/partners. I understand some people don’t like the Premiere licensing model they use; but I think it’s a good way for the developers to ensure stable income for their work; and TBH, especially with the lifetime purchase option, I think it’s undervalued. Unfortunately that model is not compatible with opensource (as users just fork it to remove the paywall), which is why Jellyfin exists from what I understand.
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself
That’s kind of the root of the issue imo; having a subscription based model doesn’t really work with open source as the project just gets forked every release to remove the subscription.
This leaves Emby with little option but to go closed source if they want income through subscriptions.
So, I’m not sure I understand what you mean with ‘the way they went about it’. Is it the subscription you had an issue with, or the fact that they were no longer open source? What would you have done differently?
And, if you don’t mind me asking: Had you supported (paid) Embys developers prior to them shifting to closed source + ‘Emby Premiere’?
To be clear, I’m not trying to be argumentative or divisive; I’m just trying to understand the animosity towards Emby and why it’s so often left out of the conversation, so to speak. It’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. Thanks for taking the time to chat about this.
Where’s Jellyfin failing the spouse test? My spouse preferred it to Plex because she could turn off all the crap on the home screen.
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.
After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
I want to go and look at the plugins I wasn’t aware that some of that stuff was available. I was an avid plug-in user until Plex pulled that from me.
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
- Easy setup, easy to use
- Low cost at <$35/year
- Can not share accounts (specifically, RD limits to one ongoing stream at a time)
- Limited customization
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.
Seconded. I’ve used this exact setup for years on an NVIDIA Shield Pro. I understand it isn’t “pure” from a piracy perspective, not the most ideal, in-the-weeds setup, but it sure does just work.
Nevermind the decades of these sites compensating for studios just not giving a sh*t about making their content accessible to the rest of the world.
Fmovie is a new one I never heard of before. Good thing they mentioned it so I know to avoid it in the future.
Still not subscribing to all the shit services. I’d rather don’t watch stuff and go outside. Yeah, you heard me right, I’ll rather be going fucking outside!
Personally I prefer when people keep their fucking inside, rather than outside where I might have to accidentally see it.
I’d happily buy stuff if they’d just give me a mkv file or a disc that isn’t encrypted.
I’ve been back to buying UHDs because I can rip them. Amazing how a good experience got me to pay again.
Touch some grass
Smoke some grass.
FTFY
Just did, lol
the only thing that will last forever is the file itself physical media cd.s only last for like 15 years 20 at most you need to get the files of the medium only then will it last forever. physical media is only temporary before you know it you cant play it anymore.
It’s time for me to self host a jellyfin server.
All this means to me is someone is going to make a peer to peer darkweb version of these sites sooner rather than later.
There are essentially infinite choices for entertainment these days. Hypothetically, even if they somehow stopped 100% of piracy, I still wouldn’t pay for their overpriced slop.
Considering how the big corporations are “cracking down” on pretty much anything they want is a clear indication that the shift already happened, the internet is no longer a “free space”
Today the internet is mostly owned by big corporations or billionaires more directly, and they subject no only it but the whole world to their whishes.
The capitalist world is a piece of shit, the good things happen despite capitalism, then capitalism comes along and sabotages and ruins everything to sell you something worse.
Everyday that phrase seems more real " you will own nothing" because you won’t be allowed to own anything, just take a look at the streaming platforms, or any other platform , they remove , they revoke , they block, they delete, they control what you can and can’t do and you can’t do anything about it.
We need a bright web.
Personally I can’t see it, what have they taken away from me?
I own way more now than I did 20yrs ago when the web was still a bright young thing.
Anything you purchase that is attached to a service and you don’t have any physical copies, you don’t actually own.
Which is pretty easy to avoid, honestly. All my music, movies, and games are on external hard drives they can’t access. Same with all of my editing software.
That needs to be the default for digital again.
oh is it that time of year again? feels like they just published the 2023 version!
Ah yes, I’m sure this crackdown will have the result of ending piracy forever.
The year of the death of the piracy is now
I mean it’s only right. Don’t we all keep getting paid for work we did years ago?
96% of corps stop with the crackdowns right before they end piracy forever
Don’t let reality stop you from doing something you love
Studios need to remember that their shows are advertising for merch and toy sales. That’s where the money is. If I pirate your show, then you don’t have to support the infrastructure to provide me a stream (which would look like shit because you’re not google). I buy posters and tshirts and stickers. Some people buy minifigs and funcopops and other plastic tat that’s cheap to make but sells for, well, whatever that crap sells for.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t mind paying $10 or $15 /month for ONE streaming service if it was able to maintain good picture quality at 1080p AND had all the shows/movies I wanted to watch in one convenient place. Extra emphasis on ‘convenient’. Even more emphasis on it actually having content I want to watch. When I watch a show, I like to watch the entire thing in like, two days. Then I’ll not watch any shows for two or three months, until something gets my attention. I don’t want to pay for a service I don’t use, cancelling and reactivating a service every couple of months is too much hassle, so I’ll just wait until the show is done airing and download it all and watch it at my pace.
surprisingly, I miss dvds.
Libraries have em. For free. And you can rip them too.
All-in-one convenience is the only reason I pay Spotify, my only streaming service. Thought about dropping them, but it would be a monstrous hassle gathering, and continuing to gather, all those MP3s. Plus, I can download that content and use it in the woods with no internet connection. Sold.
Video content? What a clusterfuck. I steal every bit of it. Hell, I got Amazon Prime and don’t bother looking at video offerings. Default: 🏴☠️
Video was nicer when you could buy a piece of physical media to watch your movie on.
Even then, you still had to contend with such nonsense as region locks later on. Can’t have people watch the movie earliest than release because the production company decided to delay release a while. That would be apocalyptic.
I also used Spotify but it has a serious problem. There’s no guarantee your contents will be always available. I had music there that, for whatever reason, was removed and I can no longer listen to it. Not to mention music that was never available there. I don’t want them to control what I can and can’t listen.
Now I only use Jellyfin. It works great (except on Android Auto, but they’ll get there). Sure I have to download the MP3 but you only have to do it once and then it will always be there. Just use spotDL and rip the music right out of Spotify with all the metadata.
