In todays episode of "Plex enshittifies" Plex employee breaks ToS.
Source: https://forums.plex.tv/t/fake-reviews-on-play-store-by-plex-staff/917736
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If you're support ANYONE other than yourself who isn't technical, it's a hurdle. And likely a significant one.
I would not be able to educate my wife properly on the times when she would need to enable wireguard on her phone to use it properly (and when to disable it for other scenarios).
This has nothing to do with running a pirate service.
Seriously it baffles me how so many advocates of Jellyfin don’t recognize the huge gulf of technical knowledge needed to set up plex vs Jellyfin. It doesn’t even compare.
Seriously. Someone tried convincing me that it would be an easy lift to send my MIL across the country a preconfigured Pi so that she could have web browser access to Jellyfin. She only has a computer for doing taxes, and watches everything on her TV.
Not only would she get confused every step of the way, even if it was just plug & play, she would also blame me if ANYTHING happened on her network and want me to fly out to fix it.
I'm not about to take that responsibility just so she can watch the latest episode of 90 day fiance. I have enough pain when she needs to sign into Plex.
Yeah I did jellyfin for a while but last time the lifetime pass went on sale for Plex I just said "fuck it," bought it, bought a cheap beelink, booted elementary OS on it, and set several friends/family up on it. I check the beelink maybe once a month for updates/adding stuff. Easy peasy.
I actually kinda did that. Sent a preconfigured thinkcentre to my mum that boots into the jellyfin media player, connects to my server via tailscale. Just had to plug it into power, lan, hdmi. Immutable, atomic system that looks for updates on boot, applies them on next reboot, and does a rollback and ping me if the update fails.
I have ssh access, and my brother lives nearby in case everything fails, that makes things easier.
I'm convinced 90% of them have never run either and just like to complain about stuff.
Setup a wireguard client so it’s always connected but is used only for a certain IP (the address of your server). If you’re interested, I can help you with that.
It's not me that's the problem. I have a permanent tunnel back to my house/infrastructure (straight wireguard). It's communicating how to use it to my users that the problem... I already do enough support that I'm just not opening that can of worms to non-tech people.
everybody downvoting your comment has zero experience being the go-to family tech guy for relatives in their 80s and 90s who can't reliably distinguish between windows, dialog boxes, menus, and buttons
Great!
How do I set up WireGuard specifically on my AppleTV? How about my Roku? My friend’s LG TV? My other friends Samsung TV?
I feel like you’re not asking for help, but rather trying to prove a point. I get it, but for Apple TV you can use https://passepartoutvpn.app/, for others, I don’t know, I have no experience.
I think they're meaning exposing it to the public for the pirate tv use case. In my personal experience (1 non savvy user using the roku app, no vpn), it's not much support. I had to talk them through initial sign on, and through re-sign-on after that latest update that forced it. Of course ymmv, but two 5 minute tech sessions with grandma over 2 years of consistent usage ain't that bad.
I've racked my brain to determine WHY that happened, but the only thing I can guess is Roku saw the channel differently because I packaged it instead of the previous person, so the config didn't port over /shrug
Never had that happen before.
I figured it was the enforcing of the trusted proxy mechanism mentioned in the release notes (only noticed because of an earlier thread here, thanks!). Once I updated my server and set the proxy settings all my clients needed to be signed again.
And I'm talking about the reverse problem. That you would need to expose it in order for it to work with other users... OTHERWISE be on the hook to support users via VPN + Jellyfin, or in the case of TV apps, Router+VPN+Jellyfin. That doesn't scale up well the moment you have someone not in your house that uses your stuff. It doesn't have to be pirate TV. Could just be a kid at college.
Yeah I don't think anyone sane would disagree. That's what forced the decision for me, to expose or not. I was not going to try talking anyone through VPN setup, so exposure + whatever hardening practice could be applied. I wouldn't really advocate for this route, but I like hearing from others doing it because sometimes a useful bit of info or shared experience pops up. The folder path explanation is news to me; time to obfuscate the hell out of that.
Exactly... But I get chastised for pointing the problem out. Called a shill because I care about security.
I RUN JELLYFIN. I HAVE IT RUNNING. Others you recommend it to should be made aware of the risks that's all I'm trying to point out.
You can get around the MD5 issue (a bit) by obfuscating your path. Instead of
/movies/title (year)/title.ext... make it/mnt/MHhzTiM57Fv4wWQmkmb4DLDwVKoB628KBQzhBHQjGQVtsjhwRrFNU2NtRGJ4dUpg/movies/title (year)/title.extand you'll probably be pretty damn immune to the problem as it stands now... But just blatantly telling people to use Jellyfin isn't a good answer here without that background.Awesome, thank you, this is exactly what I was thinking when you mentioned it earlier.
My wife has no problem starting the tailscale app and then starting the jelkyfin app. Its really that simple.
She also uses the tailscale exit node I run whenever she is on a public wifi. Its really a well designed simple to use app.
Would you like to explain to my MIL about how to set up tailscale for her entire network so she can stream to her TV?
Yep, tell her to call you over to set it up and phone you anytime 24/7 if it breaks
Awesome... cool for you. The average person doesn't even understand or even know what a VPN is.
I taught undergrad and grad college level IT courses. Many students there didn't even understand what a VPN actually is.
Edit: It works for you... great... it could even work for many... Awesome. There are legit use cases for the majority that VPN just doesn't work.
Jellyfin is a home media server. it is great for that use case. It is easy to setup and use. Most importantly its not sending data about everything we watch to some company.
Stick to plex if you want to run a free internet tv service for your cousin and their kids and whoever else and you aren't concerned with their or your privacy.
I'm into self-hosting because data privacy is my primary concern.
Ok, then why do they offer remote connectivity?