A paid plex share is a plex server that someone is running + selling access too.
This is against plex' terms, gets plex accounts banned; and in some cases, Plex (co) has taken rather drastic action by blocking entire VPS providers from reaching plex.tv; thus plex server software no longer functions on those VPS's at all.
Naturally, people selling shares want to maximize profit, so they use VPS providers on the cheaper end; resulting in cheaper VPS solutions being blocked for everyone.
I've been self-hosting for almost a decade now; never bothered with any of the giants. Just a domain pointed at me, and an open port or two. Never had an issue.
Don't expose anything you don't share with others; monitor the things you do expose with tools like fail2ban. VPN into the LAN for access to everything else.
Sure, cloudflare provides other security benefits; but that's not what OP was talking about. They just wanted/liked the plug+play aspect, which doesn't need cloudflare.
Those 'benefits' are also really not necessary for the vast majority of self hosters. What are you hosting, from your home, that garners that kind of attention?
The only things I host from home are private services for myself or a very limited group; which, as far as 'attacks' goes, just gets the occasional script kiddy looking for exposed endpoints. Nothing that needs mitigation.
Unless you are behind CGNAT; you would have had the same plug+play experience by using your own router instead of the ISP supplied one, and using DDNS.
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.
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.
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.
Up until now, I've been using the convert tool in Emby server. You can select a whole library and convert it, or individual items/playlists/collections; with options to automatically convert new media as it's added.
Tbh, I've been having a bit of trouble with it re-converting media it's already done, so I was looking for another solution.
Someone in this thread mentioned tdarr, so I'm going to be looking into that this weekend. Seems like a much more manageable tool with more powerful options.
/edit; I should also mention, this is a long process. Using an rtx4080, it was almost 3 full months non-stop to convert my entire media library from mostly h264 -> h265.
