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Plex has paywalled my server! (lemmy.giftedmc.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I tried testing a movie from my home server in plex through firefox and repeatedly got this message, even after reloading.

I knew that they had paywalled the apps on mobile and streaming from outside the network but now they have also blocked watching your own movies through your own hardware.

I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.

Even a pop up that says "we need you to donate please" would have been fine. make it pop up before every movie, play donation ads before any movie but straight up disabling the app is kinda cruel.

Anyway, i have switched to jellyfin and it is insanely good. please give it a try. you can run it alongside plex with not issues (at least i had none) and compare the two.

In any case, good luck. Let me know if you need help.

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[–] 158 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Jellyfin is great, but in defense of Plex, they announced that remote streaming would require one of the two parties to have a Plex pass was coming back in March so I don't know if it's fair to say they are holding anything hostage.

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  • [–] 67 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I started down the Jellyfin path after they made that announcement. It's super easy to install, and in many ways the UI is nicer than Plex. But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN. And I haven't had the time to look into that further.

    Would be great if there was a clean, easy way to set up the webserver portion so it's as easy to share content entirely as Plex. But I get they are a volunteer project with a lot on their plate.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I have had great success with tailscale in this regard.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    The same tailscale that announced last week that they are going to start charging?

    https://tailscale.com/kb/1251/pricing-faq

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Took a quick look at the free tier,

    • 3 users
    • 100 devices
    • Basically all tailscale features

    That seems pretty reasonable to me. Main account and two accounts to share. With just friends and family, I doubt most people will reach the 100 device limit.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Creating a tailnet using a custom domain is considered for business use.

    Well, that sucks for me. I was planning on using my domain name.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    custom domain

    From what I gather, this refers to the email address you sign up with.

    If you use something like a non-gmail email address when signing up, it starts you off on the business plan with a trial (which you can instantly change to free). (Note: they're gonna change this auto-detection thing with shared domains soon due to a security hole.)

    I believe you can still use a custom domain (instead of the randomised *.ts.net provided one) with DNS lookups in your tailnet, on the personal (free) plan.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I’m willing to recommend Tailscale because I run headscale and it does basically everything a selfhoster needs. When the free version is passable, it’s harder to enshitify the commercial version.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    announced

    What announcement? There's been a new Personal Plus plan around for several months already - introduced without much fanfare, and simply brings the user count from 3 to 6 for a fixed small fee. Presumably this is due to feedback from personal users wanting to contribute something other than nothing.

    Where do you see the free Personal plan has changed at all?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That’s great until you try and get it working on your <insert person here that doesn’t live with you>’s TV via their streaming device.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    My mom's tv surprisingly has WireGuard so I set that up for her.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN

    FWIW:

    1. vps + domain (optional?)
    2. connect vps to home server with wireguard (eg Tailscale)
    3. reverse proxy on the VPS forwarding to jellyfin (eg Caddy)

    Obviously not as trivial or seamless as Plex. Also I wouldn't try to complicate this setup by using docker for everything. But once its up you can basically host whatever you want on the WAN from your LAN.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What added security do you get by using a VPS besides obscuring your home IP? I can definitely see benifits to not leaking your home address, but otherwise the reverse proxy and wireguard tunnels don't actually add any increased security for the extra steps. You could just host a reverse proxy at home, and any flaws Jellyfin could have in their app would still be exposed.

    I'm not knocking your solution, I'm just in a similar place and considering if I want to go through the extra hurdle for a VPS if I don't need one.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Obscuring home IP is the big one. You also don't have to fiddle with opening ports on your router and maybe getting ISP attention for hosting on a residential network. But really obscuring home IP address would work.

    Dirt simplest solution is caddy on the same jellyfin server and port forward 443 and 80 on your router to that host. Hopefully letsencrypt will work without a domain but I'm not sure.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's basically what I do right now except I do have a domain and my ISP doesn't restrict inbound ports like 443 so it works fine.

    Just trying to sort out if I want the headache of a VPS if I don't need it (costs, maintenance, point of failure, etc).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Sounds like you don't need the VPS then. Add a subdomain to your home IP. Port forward 443 and 80 to the sever. Run caddy to route the subdomain to localhost:8096. You will also need to tell jellyfin to accept on the new domain.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If they’re calling it remote streaming when you’re on the same (local) network, that’s not exactly intuitive. I’d say OP’s phrasing was fair.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    OP has a misconfigured server and isn't connecting to their server over LAN.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    But I keep hearing the value of Plex is that anyone can use it.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes anyone can use it even people who don't know how to configure their server

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The OP might disagree from what I'm seeing.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    OP is also in the allegedly ultra rare camp of “successfully configured Jellyfin and lived to tell the tale.” Not what I’d expect of someone unable to configure Plex correctly. I’ve not set up a Plex server myself but my guess is it wasn’t clear that it was misconfigured - it did work previously, after all.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, with Plex constantly changing allowed abilities and such, it seems to me that this is the expected outcome.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    This is one change (which isn't the cause of OP's problem) that they announced months ago. I've been using it for well over a decade and while I have had major issues with it in the past going so far as to setup Emby and buying a lifetime license for that, I would hardly say that they're "constantly changing allowed abilities."

    Most people's issue with them is that they focus too much on adding new stuff that nobody asked for while ignoring longtime bugs. I can't recall a time they've ever locked anything behind a paywall that wasn't a brand new feature prior to this.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I can't speak for OP, but I self host lots of stuff, have literally dozens of services running, have an Ansible repo to manage it all and routi some stuff through a VPS, not to mention my day job has included managing services in one way or another for a long while. This is to say, I know what I'm doing. I couldn't setup Plex to work the way I wanted to, they expect it to run in a docker with network set to host mode, I couldn't find any way to tell Plex that my living room TV was in the same network, it just wouldn't accept any connections as local. I know I shot myself in the foot here by not letting it run with network on host mode, but I shouldn't have to, the port was exposed, I could reach it through the local network IP, but I wasn't able to stream any content locally.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If you don't set it to host, the docker container is in a different ip range than your tv. That's why it assumes it's not in the same network (which it isn't)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Just because the destination IP address is not a LAN address? That's not misconfiguration, that's a legitimate use of NAT reflection/loopback. If that's how it determines who is streaming remotely then just run it behind nginx that forgets to set the correct headers.

    Edit: Apparently Plex centrally relays all the traffic? Self-hosted my 🍑, it's not self-hosted if you need to rely on their server.

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  • [–] [S] -3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, there is no defence on enshittification, sorry. I have jellyfin now. Its also not remote which makes this a huge dick move too.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Wait its not remote? You're on your local network?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    OP has set it up wrong so it’s ALL going remote, even when he’s in the same house.

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  • [–] [S] -5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I have it set up in a way. That does not make it wrong. This is an option that plex gives you without warning so its their problem in the first place. They also just paywalled that feature that worked for years and they're not considering the consequences or they dont care. The least they could have done is put a link "if youre seeing this on your home network, you need to do THIS."

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You set it up in the wrong way if you want to stream locally on your network.

    It’s ok to admit that you made a mistake and it’s not plex’s fault. Just take some responsibility for your actions.

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