roguetrick ,

You gotta be stupid as shit to run something like this from the US and keep a financial tail of credit card payments to you.

You also gotta be stupid as shit to actually pay 10 bux for this.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.

Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it's share of pirate hosted files.

uninvitedguest ,
@uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca avatar

Wait, is that actually Twitch's history - Justin.tv?

neclimdul ,

It is. Until recently it actually still used the domain to serve assets.

uninvitedguest ,
@uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca avatar

Wild. What an obscure piece of internet history to have missed out on as an old Justin.tv user.

phoneymouse ,

Was Justin.tv doing copyright infringing things? I seem to remember it was just a guy streaming his everyday life. He would literally wear a hat with a camera on it and record everything he did all day. It makes sense that it became twitch because they solved a technical problem around mass streaming that empowers twitch today.

suction ,

I remember watching Pay-tv (Premier League / Bundesliga matches) on Justin TV back in the day, when it was still obscure enough to not attract the copyright holder's attention. That was definitely infringing.

phoneymouse ,

I see.. I only remember the very early days of Justin.tv and kind of lost track of it between then and when it became twitch.

aidan ,

Yeah but megaupload was legit but was still shutdown despite being massive

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

They had their servers seized, but were later returned and the service came back as mega.nz, legit and all.

aidan ,

Yeah uh no. that's not the whole story, Mega is a new company, the difference is it's encrypted so the theory was they'd have no way to scan for pirated content. Mega was also seized people think, it's unclear who or what currently opperates it. And Kim Dotcom's extradition case is ongoing.

aidan ,

Yeah uh no. that's not the whole story, Mega is a new company, the difference is it's encrypted so the theory was they'd have no way to scan for pirated content. Mega was also seized people think, it's unclear who or what currently opperates it. And Kim Dotcom's extradition case is ongoing.

badbytes ,

5 times the content. Where do I sign up?

kratoz29 ,

Check out Softwarr "for free" or Real Debrid and Stremio/Kodi if you wanna spend some well spend money, the latter guarantee more content than Netflix etc, the former everything that could ever exists on the internet.

GladiusB ,
@GladiusB@lemmy.world avatar

It's called notjetflix.org.gov

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,

The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!

LonelyWendigo ,

Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.

aidan ,

To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more

Cosmicomical ,

To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it's cheaper that licensing the actual good stuff.

aidan ,

eh some of it is good, I personally wouldn't want to just watched licensed shows from 50 years ago

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.

Movie star isn't supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.

aidan ,

Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

I mean, supposed to according to who?

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.

So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that's a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.

aidan ,

But, tbh, that's just some guys opinion

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

That's rather dismissive. Also vague. Are you saying that the notion that wealth disparity is bad is just some guy's opinion, or that you're not supposed to be able to get rich being a movie star (or a private equity investor, or a hedge fund manager, or a California gold miner)?

Usually when people are vague and terse, I assume they're losing interest in the conversation. It's okay to walk away.

aidan ,

That's rather dismissive.

I don't mean it that way.

Are you saying that the notion that wealth disparity is bad is just some guy's opinion,

This is true yes, but back to the original topic

or that you're not supposed to be able to get rich being a movie star (or a private equity investor, or a hedge fund manager, or a California gold miner)?

This yes. I am saying nobody has any authority to assert what is or isn't supposed to be highly paid, but it is fair to believe nobody should be highly paid.

Usually when people are vague and terse, I assume they're losing interest in the conversation. It's okay to walk away.

I really do genuinely appreciate the consideration, I'm fine right now, but thank you regardless!

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

When it comes to capitalist macroeconomics, as I understand it, wealth disparity is one of the big decay factors the government is supposed to monitor and correct for. Mind you, I learned MacEc in the mid 1980s but even after theory shifted from national economies to globalist economics (the free(-er) trade movement of the 1990s) wealth distribution, and the bow of that graph was supposed to be kept shallow.

There are a lot of ways to restore some balance, such as taxing rich people and investing in welfare programs and social safety nets. In the case of freelance musicians (and freelance investments, which allowed people of lower income classes to invest sooner) these are just paradigm changes that allowed more people to participate, with the expectation that more people would be moderately successful rather than a few people being ostentatiously successful. Fewer Bruce Springsteens, more John Coultons. This wasn't contrived by government though, so it's more of a happy accident.

And yes, Marx in Das Kapital notes that the ownership class invariably captures government and regulation which ends efforts to keep wealth more evenly distributed so we have situations like now (or like the Great Depression, a century ago) where a few people own almost everything and aren't willing to let it go, even though the only thing they can do by hoarding their wealth is accumulate more wealth. And history has continued to bear this out, and to show that a well-regulated capitalist system is only temporary at best, which has driven me to believe we have to figure out something better.

Post-scarcity communism would be ideal, but we haven't yet worked out how to get there from here, and really I'd be happy for anything that doesn't turn into a one-party plutocrat-controlled autocracy held together by fascism and a nationalist war effort.

And sure, economics is a soft science so this is all just someone's opinion, though the someones in this case are multiple smart historical figures who actually thought about it a bit. I'm not an economist, so I rely on experts who are.

PS: This is my attempt to either find common ground, or to lay plain what my position is and where it comes from. I'm not invested in you adopting it, but if you want me to consider a different one, I'll need cause to do so.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Netflix service started as hosting only.

aidan ,

Yeah, imo it was also a bit more difficult then. But yeah as others said, the licensing was hard too

MeThisGuy ,

correction.. Netflix started by mailing DVDs, even before Redbox was a thing

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Ah. Analogue hosting. But they definitely didn't start producing content.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can't couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.

It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.

aidan ,

The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don't see it as particularly valuable.

Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.

There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn't a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed

From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh's work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh's art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.

There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

aidan ,

From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

I don't really understand how this follows from what I said.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

Do you have a source for that? (And what that claim actually means), afterall, plenty of "essential" inventions in the modern day(including the base of modern rocketry) came from weapons development- does that make war a good investment? (Of course its not 1-to-1 because war is destructive, but my point is putting a lot of effort and smart people into almost anything will lead to a lot of innovation)

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh -- that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.

My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they're already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14

Do you have a source for that?

This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.

aidan ,

To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.

That's how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It's how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.

The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can't stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.

That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we've yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy -- what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains -- offers more than a few.

suction ,

cringe

GroundedGator ,

caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,_

Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.

They will never end piracy and I'd argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.

Tja ,

Get your communism here! Only $9.99 a month, or just $99.99 for a year!

Etterra ,

Farewell heroes. I may not have heard of you before, but I shall mourn your departure nevertheless.

Snapz , (edited )

Nobody gives a shit, you're not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after beating peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

RubberElectrons ,
@RubberElectrons@lemmy.world avatar

Say it again, friend.

AlbinoPython ,

Nobody gives a shit, you're not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.

This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after bearing peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.

You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

tetris11 ,
@tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

say it again, friend, but in french

bitwaba ,

Non

tetris11 ,
@tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

well alright, but I'm going to have to report this

TeoTwawki ,
@TeoTwawki@lemmy.world avatar
AFC1886VCC ,

Tout le monde s'en fout, vous ne faites pas assez pour punir Trump pour ses crimes évidents, littéralement filmés et enregistrés.

C'est l'équivalent des flics qui se réjouissent d'avoir abattu des manifestants pacifiques à l'université tout en se pissant dessus et en se gelant pendant que les enfants d'uvalde se faisaient massacrer et torturer psychologiquement.

Vous vous concentrez sur la non-victoire et ignorez les échecs. Lâches.

MeThisGuy ,

say it again, friend, but in dutch

Snapz ,

This guy GETS it.

AHemlocksLie ,

You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

That's not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don't go after Trump. He's in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.

Adalast ,

When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that "to serve and protect" is literally gaslighting.

iknowitwheniseeit ,

Police don't even really have a duty to enforce the law, at least not in the USA:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

ChickenLadyLovesLife ,

They don't even have a duty to know what the law is.

Sidyctism2 ,

Not all heroes wear capes, but some have a sidegig as firefighters

werefreeatlast ,

And wear a sexy mustache?

Sidyctism2 ,

I mean probably?

werefreeatlast ,

Excellent!

smb ,

its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.

however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim.
maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like "better get money from ALL markets!" or such.

suction ,

Not trying to sound elitist, but...all the content combined still isn't worth $10. Mind you the last TV show I liked was Better Call Saul, the last Hollywood movie I liked was...let me think...The Irishman, I guess?

Since 2000 the amount of TV shows I truly enjoyed watching and would watch again was maybe 8. The amount of movies maybe 20. So less than one per year.

And because I don't have to watch stuff when it comes out, but am totally fine with watching things years later, when it's cheap or free, I'd wager I spend less than $10 per year on TV and movie entertainment.

iopq ,

I think the shows have been better than the movies

Succession was really good, for example

suction ,

Yes, they have been. But Succession is an example of a show which I thought I would like, and did for one season, but never finished, because the writing was so lazy and repetitive, and what's worse constantly pretending huge things happened while nothing actually happened.

JudahBenHur ,

its a character study, not a bombastic thriller. Same as the shows most folks rave about: Sopranos, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Arrested Development.. its fine to not like anything but I'm not sure why you'd take time to write about how you don't like anything. Do you find posts about, say, an art heist and post about how you haven't liked any paintings in a couple centuries

silasmariner ,

Quite a lot happened in the Wire TBF (also I think it's the strongest of the ones you've mentioned, largely for that reason..)

suction ,

Ouch, comparing Succession to an absolute masterwork like the Sopranos hurts...and shows that you probably don't actually watch those shows but have them on in the background. And if Succession is such a character study, why do the writers pretend it's something else? It was a really bad show, man.

JudahBenHur ,

what you dont know could fill a book
I wouldnt put succession on the same tier as sopranos (very little comes close), all I was saying is its not about crazy plot twists, and more about the way the emotionally crippled kids of logan roy cosplay as human beings. I enjoyed it- jeremy strong and brian cox did a great job imo

VirtualOdour ,

All my favorite movies this year have been on youtube.

Most of them by Joel Haver.

rmuk ,

Sire!

Tony Ladruzo?

Huzzah!

TheFonz ,

Hollywood has been sucking ass lately, but lots of small indie films have been kicking ass. Everything from A24 has been fantastic recently. Lots of good foreign films too

suction ,

Even A24 has a track record of 1 in 10, getting worse.

TheFonz ,

Yes, making movies is not an easy feat. But there's plenty of good stuff coming out. Don't know what to tell you.

Doof ,

You don’t sound elitist, just a little boring.

suction ,

I'll take that as a compliment. It's the 2nd time someone told me this, the first time was when a girl found out I didn't have any tattoos.

Nobilmantis ,
@Nobilmantis@feddit.it avatar

Teoretically speaking, asking for a friend who's doing research, how would you access such a service? :)

dependencyinjection , (edited )

There’s plenty of services like this that people use a firestick to connect too.

My friend uses one but I forget the name of it. You can find them online but people usually buy a package of say 20 connections and then sell them to friends and family. I’ll try and remember what to search for and come back.

Edit: IPTV is a good search term.

SturgiesYrFase ,
@SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

Legend

dependencyinjection ,

Nah just a regular dude trying to help others when I can.

ramjambamalam ,

IPTV is the name of the pirated cable TV streams. Personally, I consider commercialized piracy to be a bit distasteful compared to the free and open source route, and I have the know how to self host my own streaming service.

Although it's not piracy, another free option to consider for live TV, if you're within range of TV broadcasters, is a digital TV antenna. I'm looking into that since not only is it free and legal, it's also the best picture quality, not compressed like IPTV (legit or pirated) or even cable.

SturgiesYrFase ,
@SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

I'm in the UK, so loads of live TV over the air.

Chakravanti ,

Hey, look! They had a cookbook on tyranny...

sunbeam60 , (edited )

“Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.

I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.

muculent ,

Streaming services become required by law like insurance

Wait, why am I required to pay for a streaming service?

Because it has all of the entertainment electrolytes a human needs

DasSkelett ,

We already have the private copying levy in Germany and some other countries, where you have to pay a fee for several products (printers, scanners, storage media like HDDs, SSDs, SD cards and thumb drives...) due to the potential that you could do (legal!) private copies of copyrighted media on them.
The copyright collectives can set the amount of the fees freely (and it's ridiculously high).

This comes shockingly close to the concept already.

Deway ,

I member the good old days when we were buying our blank CD/DVD in Germany to avoid paying those taxes.

Mikina ,

I'm not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that's absolutely bullshit.

So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It's bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don't care about or use?

You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don't have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don't). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.

Cocodapuf ,

Yeah, I've got one of those too. Plex is great.

rmuk ,

ITT: Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Jellyfin?

el_abuelo ,

Couldn't get on with Jellyfin...emby however has been fantastic!

Cocodapuf ,

You know, I've heard this gospel before, I might still have the pamphlet...

Honestly, I haven't really looked into jellyfin yet. I hear it's superior in some way... But I already have Plex all set up and I have 4 friends with servers and we all share content. So it would take a lot for me to switch.

mint_tamas ,

It really isn’t superior. It’s just the hivemind that gets annoyed with Plex being stagnant, not open source etc. that claims it is. At best it has feature parity for some use-cases. Don’t get me wrong, it’s neat, but it’s not as polished as Plex.

squidspinachfootball ,

Tbh, I just like that mobile app watching is free instead of paywalled

Jayb151 ,

Jellyfin is a bitch to get working outside my network. I don't get how Plex made it so easy

AllHailTheSheep ,

really? I never had an issue with just sticking it behind a reverse proxy, doing some port forwarding, and setting an apex domain record, that was it. curious what wasn't working for you?

figaro ,

Lol

Lost_My_Mind ,

...............do what now?

AllHailTheSheep ,
Darkassassin07 ,
@Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca avatar

The number of people I've come across that are absolutely baffled by the concept of port forwarding....

Then you add CGNAT ontop and things can get really complicated for someone unfamiliar.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Plex operates a service on their end that mostly covers you if you fuck up the network routing. It's probably the least user friendly part of the setup, so kind of a big deal.

Doof ,

Lasted a week and went back to Plex.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I'm trying to switch to Jellyfin I really am. With Plex I could just throw a file bot at my files normalize the names and it was fine. I can't mark things watched or unwatched from the Roku client. I've now tried three separate times to get the Doctor who specials to show up with names. Plex is by no means perfect but it's so much easier to keep Plex goomed

stellargmite ,

I was fretting over Doctor Specials, season numbers, eras and naming a few weeks back. In fairness it has been running since black and white times so not too bad considering. Whats a filebot by the way and whats a good one?

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Filebot a piece of software, it looks up your files on TMDB and themoviedb and renamese your files based on those lookups. Plex takes that naming very very well. We really need jellyfin to work with it too.

capital ,

I want to switch very badly but their device apps are lacking.

MSids , (edited )

I always wonder why some people are so dedicated to Jellyfin. Even if JF had full feature and experience parity, it would still not have secure remote access the way Plex does. There is no need to port forward or NAT Plex for external access if you use app.plex.tv to access. With the threat landscape the way it is today, that is worth a lot.

AllHailTheSheep ,

I haven't used Plex in a while, but I'm confused how Plex handles WAN connections without using any port forwarding? how is that possible?

Scrollone ,

I think there's a misconception.

Plex can "hide" (not really) your own server because you can direct your users on Plex.tv (they can login there, etc. without ever typing your IP address).

But Plex can also use an internal reverse proxy that lets you see your content from outside even without port forwarding. However, quality and speed will be decreased.

I think Jellyfin should work to ease the process of setting up your server as much as they can, but unless they start managing a SaaS like Plex does, they'll never be able to offer the same simplicity for the end user.

AllHailTheSheep ,

personally, I wouldn't want my files going through plexs servers, especially with how shit I've heard they are with their privacy policy. that's a really interesting concept tho, and makes a lot of sense. I doubt jellyfin will ever do that simply because they don't have the resources to host that as you said.

thanks for the explanation tho! greatly appreciated

MSids ,

Plex, as a company, definitely is aware of what items are in your library but streams don't go through the Plex servers unless you use the Plex proxy service which is enabled by default but only used when the client connection speed is too slow to use the desired streaming setting.

Everyone who accesses their Plex externally should use app.plex.tv rather than NAT/port forwarding unless you're also doing IP whitelisting on the NAT (not feasible for most remote access scenarios, as IPs are dynamic in most cases). Jellyfin should never be exposed externally.

I work in a highly regulated sector of IT and have learned that even the most robust software will have serious exploits at some point.

turmacar ,

Last time I looked at Jellyfin server setup was fine. It's getting non-techies to a place where they can access it that was rough. They're getting better with 3rd party app support but Plex has a huge head start.

MSids ,

I have not looked into it for a while but I believe their servers broker a direct connection between the client and server.

Darkassassin07 , (edited )
@Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca avatar

Both the client and server connect to plex.tv which then brokers the connection between them. They essentially work as a very limited vpn between your clients and server.

This also gives them unrestricted access to the entirety of data passed between devices; and the ability to request any and all info from your server to be handed to whoever they chose.

This is also how they allow you to 'share' content/libraries with each others servers; through their public infrastructure that's collecting your information. Information they then sell to third parties to support their development and broker content agreements.

AllHailTheSheep ,

thanks for the explanation. I'll stick with jellyfin for now, I've heard rough things about privacy with Plex and that explains why.

Darkassassin07 ,
@Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca avatar

Plex is a privacy nightmare that's slowly trying to faze out you having a server all together in favor of feeding you commercialized content from other providers; and many people find Jellyfin is far too unpolished/disorganized for a lot of debatable reasons I won't go into.

I've been quite happy with the middle ground: Emby. It's not FOSS, but is well polished with consistent development, great feature parity across platforms, excellent clients for pretty much every device I'd want to use, and a helpful community ready to assist with any problems you come across. They also have a heavy focus on privacy; with no third party partners collecting your info like Plex, and no telemetry sent from servers/clients.

The lifetime premier license I bought 7 years ago was well worth it.

Scrollone ,

Wasn't Jellyfin developed using the Emby source code as a starting point?

Darkassassin07 ,
@Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca avatar

Yes. Emby was originally open source, but people would regularly fork it to remove the licensing. When they chose to go closed source; jellyfin forked that final release and has built from there.

Emby has a premier licencing system to support their development, instead of selling user data and making deals with content providers like Plex, or depending on OSS development/contributions like Jellyfin.

As far as I understand almost 80% of jellyfins current code is the original Emby code (called 'media browser' or 'MB' at the time), though to be fair, I haven't verified that claim.

MHSJenkins ,
@MHSJenkins@infosec.pub avatar

"When a hero comes along . . ."

Jollyllama ,

Did someone leak their Jellyfin credentials?

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