I’ve been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” Based on that I don’t think Plex qualifies.

Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my “friends” were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.

Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.

So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?

  • jlow@slrpnk.netEnglish
    238·
    15 hours ago

    For me, if I can’t use it when the internet is down it’s not self-hosting, so Plex certainly isn’t for me.

    • JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      10 hours ago

      This can be done but you need to set the ip address ranges that don’t require auth when you can still get into the server(aka have internet). Then it works without internet fine.

      • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 hours ago

        Not really. I actually got rid of my Amazon Fire Stick because it didn’t work offline, but Plex did. I discovered this because my TV automatically showed the Plex shares as browsable media sources, which were being broadcast over DLNA.

        • JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          9 hours ago

          That’s an option too but that’s mostly just DLNA and not really Plex (as the client).

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        81·
        10 hours ago

        You can use Plex without the Internet. But it takes an extra two or three setup steps, so lots of people immediately jump to “wahhh my Plex isn’t working” when their Internet goes out. Not because it can’t work, but because they didn’t jump through the extra hoops to ensure it does.

    • thumdinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
      43·
      10 hours ago

      This. I’ve had a couple of situations where we had an ISP outage and for whatever reason Plex Auth had expired and needed to connect to their servers to regain access to local media. The first time it happened I was pissed off. The second time it happened I installed Jellyfin and never looked back.

      • remon@ani.socialEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        You can white list local IP address if you want them to work without auth. Just a config issue in your end.

      • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        35·
        6 hours ago

        Jellyfin. Jellyfin. JELLYFIN. install it now? Is it the right fit? Fuck you who cares. I loaded Jellyfin and it worked for me so if it doesn’t work for you then you’re wrong!

        Jellyfin!

        Forget Emby or Kodi. JELLYFIN JELLYFINJELLUFIN!!!