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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lol, did he have the AI bros in marketing write it too? If they’re gonna do this they could at least write their own bullshit…
Marketing probably asked everyone to write a review on their internal Slack or something.
Dude just could have said something like,“Hey, I’m a developer of Plex and have really enjoyed my experience using it. Let me know if you’d like to see something added/fixed.”
This review would have had a lot more credibility if he at least disclosed his affiliation with Plex. Instead, he posed as some unbiased rando while advertising Plex Pass. This is textbook gaslighting.
If you look on Plex’s review page in the Play Store, it’s receiving overwhelming amounts of negative reviews over the new UI changes, reliability/performance problems, and how the Lifetime Plex Pass purchase is a lifetime of regrets as they watch Plex getting worse every month by enshittifying itself.
If Plex is resorting to leaving fake reviews to save face, then this company is in deeper trouble than I thought.
This is textbook gaslighting.
Well if I spent 5 minutes instead of 0.5 minutes I might be able to find an actual text book but I think APA Dictionary of Psychology: “gaslight” is a pretty good definition:
to manipulate another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.
And it provides an example, from the original source of the term:
a wife is nearly driven to insanity by the deceptions of her husband
It is tres shitty to minimize actual abusive behavior by applying a term associated with intimate partner violence it to this minor thing which is someone posting a comment on some software he works at using an account which goes to zero effort to obfuscate that.
In penance I decree you should watch the movie https://archive.org/details/gaslight-1944 and tell me if it’s any good, I haven’t seen it yet.
This is the type of pedantry that annoys me and yet I admire. Bravo, good fellow, I salute you
Community Manager: After we changed the terms of our public client to force everyone to pay for what used to be a free service, our ratings have taken a hit. If we don’t get back to at least 4.0, Google won’t feature us for free advertising. Everyone, go and leave a 5-star review.
Developers: but there are mill…
Community Manager: STOP, go and review now. scoot!
I work at a brewery. Am I not allowed to tell people I like the beer I brew? I’m doing this very wrong I guess my brewery has been enshittified by me. Bummer
You can tell people whatever you want and they can criticize you accordingly.
If you don’t disclose your affiliation with a company that you’re shilling, rational people will criticize you for being biased and self-serving.
If you want to avoid this completely rational, acceptable, and expected criticism, then you should reveal any conflicts of interest before or during your promotion of the business.
This shouldn’t need to be spelled out for you, but this generation has been conditioned to be proud of ignorance and defending abuse.
Am I not allowed to tell people I like the beer I brew?
That’s not really what he’s doing though. It would be like if you pretended to be a customer and drink your own beer in front of actual customers and were like “WOW! This beer is super good! The guy who made it has a really big dick!”
It’s just shitty to do because it’s sheistery as fuck.
Plex employees totally have the right to review Plex in the store. But they should be expected to advertise that they work for Plex…because he didn’t the review loses any credibility that it had previously.
If you leave your brewery a public review pretending to just be another customer, yeah thats pretty shitty. You kniw what you’re doing, don’t play games.
You kniw what you’re doing
Exactly. They know what they’re doing and we shouldn’t pretend that they don’t.
Scumbags are all around us, hiding in plain sight.
you know full well its not a matter of liking the product you’re affiliated with, but an undisclosed conflict of interest in an environment where people have a reasonable expectation of transparent, non-biased testimonials from normal end users, not shilling from paid employees.
Are you allowed to tell people that you dislike your beer, as a representative of the brewery?
I was going to say if he writes an app and doesn’t like it, something’s wrong there
Perhaps. Either way, he’s biased, and reviews should be unbiased.
They don’t need to be, as long as you disclose your bias.
Reviews of VIM will inherently be biased by interest level in keyboard only navigation. No one can critically review anything entirely without bias unless we allow for reviewers to admit their biases.
People really abuse that new and very useful word. It diminishes the usefulness.
I saw someone describe rental housing as enshittified.
No honey, it’s just shitty.
It’s very nearly a synonym for value extraction. I guess specifically it refers to the consequences of value extraction on the web, but really I think Doctorow’s whole goal with that campaign was to make people aware of how awful venture capital and value extraction really are for us. I’m less concerned with preserving a canonical definition of enshittification as I am getting people aware of the consequences of capitalist financialization. As a well-published author himself, I’m sure Doctorow is well prepared for figurative death of the author :P
Plex has always been shilled hard for useful idiots with more money than sense.
Like, free streaming services are right there. Why overcomplicate things just so you can fit in with other losers on the internet?
I swear, so many of you are leaning on each other without realizing none of you have a clue what’s going on.
It’s relatively inexpensive and makes life much easier for people who are not tech savvy. Your position is that of an incredibly egoistic person that never had to help an older relative or dealt with an adult who doesn’t have time for random bs during an hour or so of downtime most people get in a day.
If spending hours trying to figure out which “free” streaming service had not gotten shot down today and magically has the content you want is worth less to you than a one time payment of a few bucks to plex, then you really don’t value your time.
Well this thread is an absolute shitshow.
Jellyfin is great, but if you refuse to let yourself understand that Plex’s ease of setup for remote access is a point in its favour - especially when sharing with non-tech savvy people - then you’re just as bad as the supposed “Plex shills”.
Plex is well on the enshittification train, and I’ve always been a bit concerned about how private it may or may not be, but there’s absolutely no way I’d have been able to share a Jellyfin instance with my grandfather, especially as his dementia got worse.
I tried jellyfin but it isn’t even close to as a good as plex
Same as my experience
Emby’s better than both, but jellyfin folks are probably going to crucify me for saying that.
jellyfin was a fork of emby anyway, its core framework is solid.
Emby has more of the plex-like polish, but it is more closed source than I would prefer to trust with my media, so I get by with Jellyfin. It works more than well enough fro my in-home media streaming and I still run plex for my remote users as I bought a plex pass way back at the start and I’m going to use it until I simply cant anymore… which seems to be rapidly approaching.
Can’t say me remote entry isnt working. Was streamong it from my phone in the firefox and chrome browser while on the go and also from my work pc.
Can’t imagine how easier one wants it to be in comparison (it’s literally like navigating to Youtube).Samsung TVs have a Plex app, but not a Jellyfin one. Lots of people have Samsung TVs. I mean lots. Other modern TVs are likely the same, like Onn (at least the Roku TVs) last time I checked, and again they are all over. The ease-of-use factor really is a huge win for Plex.
Edit: Yes, Samsung Tizen models can try and sideload an app, but that’s not something the vast majority of people are ever going to even think about, let alone figure out how to accomplish.
Using roku jellyfin app daily, but I agree the fact that jellyfins app hasnt been approved for tizen yet is a point against it
Is that on an Onn TV? I might have to go check it out again. Thanks!
Yeah, I get it. I just prefer the polish.
As someone with lifetime Emby premium, I switched to Jellyfin.
Why?
Emby development is dead in the water. It works, it’s stable, but it’s treading water. And because it is partially closed source and not changing much the addon development community is not as robust. If you try it and it has what you want, it works just fine. But I want an active community making new features and developing add-ons and extending what I get out of it. I did not need premium to get a similar feature set out of Jellyfin, I am an experienced self hoster so I was able to switch without missing a beat. And now I can click a button to skip and intro, or the recap for the episode I just finished watching. And I can try the very large set of add-ons that are out there.
Always funny how anyone is crucified (on Lemmy) for using Windows or (how dare you) paid and/or free proprietary software.
Yet when it comes to something like Plex they always backpedal and either state that they don’t have something like that or it’s so convenient.
If one goes on a (F)OSS crusade at least be consistent… >:(for using Windows
Has a time and place… But for the general person you can just put them in front of linux and they wouldn’t have any idea as long as they can see the chrome icon to get to facebook.
I can see that side of the discussion… Getting over the roadblock of installation… I’ve converted many people to Linux. My argument with people defending windows is that they always seem to think that “windows just works”… which it really doesn’t… or that linux sucks because of x, y, and z… and when I pull out a news article of windows having widespread issues because of “x” where x is literally the same x as they just said for linux… It’s cricket chirps all around.
Plex is convenient. It’s userbase is proof of that. Windows is convenient in that it comes pre-installed on the computer the user is using… but otherwise a user would be perfectly fine or even possibly have less issues on linux.
I don’t find that to be inconsistent.
I as an arch using turbonerd absolutely love jellyfin and how I can make it do what I want.
I run plex too, because the support I’d have to provide to family members when they need a password reset, or the jellyfin app doesn’t work right on their new Hisense smart TV would be the death of me.
This. Having the provide the support is what stops me from dropping plex entirely. I host jellyfin for the devices I control, and plex for my family and friends, all pointing to the same media.
How so?
Yo dad, heres the login:
username: dad
password: Pa$$TheP0pIf it asks for a URL on the first screen input the following URL:
https://jellyfin.domain.tld/If you (or a relative) can’t manage that, I’d be afraid to even let you handle a car or open a bank account.
Can’t imagine you relative doesnt also have to create a plex account somewhere to then be invited to the plex share or input the URL to request access.Assuming you set it up for SSL, and you own and manage your own domain, and they’re using a computer. Easy. So for the 10% it’s cake.
How’s it look for the rest?
For the record, I fucking hate Plex.
But this is a disingenuous simplification of where the gap is.
Me, my brother-in-law, and friend all share our libraries with the same elderly relatives.
The GAP is that great grandma has to log in/out between servers to find content that may or may not be on an individual server. Plex lets you search/aggregate from all sources without having to jockey credentials and servers.
It’s not a giant ask. I heard a fucking absolutely brain-dead take that “that would require a centralized server which is against Jellyfins core ideology”.
So, I dunno. Maybe it isn’t YOUR use case, but it’s MY use case. Doesn’t make me a shill. I’m still pissed as hell.
But don’t fucking pretend that there is feature parity when there isn’t, and don’t accuse me of being a shill just because Jellyfin literally doesn’t support my use case. I WISH it did. I HATE PLEX.
You’re responding to the same disingenuous argument you see all over Lemmy made by folks whose jobs are in the IT field.
That being said, why hate Plex? I’m sure, like me, you’re grandfathered in. Is it fucking new users? Sure. Sucks. Not everything is a battlefield, and they’ll eventually fuck me and then I will abandon them, it is what it is. But for now, the shit just always works with almost no tweaking from me. I really can’t ask for much more. Got my mom to watch The Wire because of Plex.
I stopped trying to use Plex years ago (like 10) when that shit was just painful… AND they wanted to charge me for the luxury of that pain.
I’m sure it got lots better, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth at the time I’ve gone without easy media watching instead, and tried all sorts of things.
Hopefully Jellyfin keeps improving. I’d rather donate to them every year than pay a sub to Plex.
Glad it’s worked for you though, and I mean that. When Plex worked for me, it was pretty good.
They won’t even get to the login screen.
All my relatives seem to have Hisense VIDAA TVs. There’s a plex app on the store. Jellyfin would require an external device like a Chromecast or HTPC to use it.
But now telling then it’s $3/month to watch my pirated movies? No bueno.
And on topic, I develop a commercial app and there is no way I am dropping a rating or review on it.
I don’t disagree with you, at all. But what’s the $3/mo subscription you’re talking about? I haven’t had a Chrome/Firestick/whatever since like 2012, so I’m out of the loop
But now telling then it’s $3/month to watch my pirated movies? No bueno.
I lol’d at this I won’t lie.
Oh cool so you’re ok with opening ports on your server to the internet with no authentication. Good for you. Most of us with the technical knowledge of hosting a media server know better.
What’s not authenticated? Run it through nginx and cloudflare, what exactly am I missing?
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
A reverse proxy won’t help (unless you’re doing authentication with it). A cloudflare tunnel would help, if it requires authentication.
Neither helps because jellyfin doesn’t work with auth in front of it. https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/13751
And any auth mechanism breaks EVERY app even if you implement one that doesn’t break the web UI. (short of VPN or other similar type of auth’d tunneling).
Fortunately, jellyfin loads fine behind an nginx proxy using basic auth.
Sounds like it works fine in the scenario I was discussing.
Ah yes, single cherry picked sentence… Care to read the very next line? Where “unfortunately, […]”… Is that “shit doesn’t load right?” Weird.
Do you know of any apps that support basic auth input for jellyfin? No… Weird? What did I say again?
Oh right, I can just scroll up and read it.
And any auth mechanism breaks EVERY app even if you implement one that doesn’t break the web UI.
Oh no, Chinese hackers know I only like the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons!
They would, I suppose, were my Jellyfin available to anyone living outside of my own state via geoblocking. You can’t even connect to it from the country I host the proxy from, not that they’d do anything if they could, all of the data shared is read-only.
I would’ve just let my setup be open, but, like you said, most of us with the technical knowledge of hosting a media server know better.
edit: chill with the downvotes, lads. Season 9 isn’t completely terrible.
edit: replied in the wrong spot. moved elsewhere in the thread.
It’s about on par with other movies of the era. If you like those, you’ll like Gaslight.
I seem to have replied to the main thread instead of the specific comment that mentioned gaslight. Didn’t you notice a complete no sequitur?
Hitchcockian study of human nature. Everyone should see it at least once, too fully understand the meaning of gaslight.
Leaving this completely unrelated link to a better alternative here: https://jellyfin.org/
Use free streaming sites.
Anything that you want to ‘collect’ can be downloaded and stored on an external hard drive and taken with you where you need to go.
Don’t overcomplicate things just to fit in with losers on the internet.
Leaving this for people to realize that there’s a literal chapter’s worth of book of security issues that haven’t been fixed and seems to keep getting the can kicked down the road… for over 4 years now.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
I love Jellyfin… people need to implement it sensibly knowing the potential risks.
Edit: Ah yes! I MUST be a shill for saying “Implement it sensibly”.
Here, let me “de-shill” myself.
You have several options to make Jellyfin serviceable to users outside of your literal LAN network.
- setup a VPN. Pray you don’t have a user on a device that doesn’t have a VPN app that you can work with.
- setup whitelisting on your server. Pray that IP addresses don’t change.
- setup fail2ban or crowdsec. Pray that you users don’t piss off either by doing user things and getting locked out.
If anything above fails… you’re likely on the hook for support. Hope you plan for that!
- Obfuscate your paths (change
/movies/title (year)/title.extto something like/9ZHBrvNH4dKQDYFa2parH32qqSFpjsWTataVkjy4NqPxpVktT55PkEee5YSVRvUQ/movies/title (year)/title.ext). MD5 is now much harder to generate/guess… pray that there isn’t some other vulnerability. Gotta go back and reconfigure and organize your shit. Oh and make sure that your docker mounts aren’t crushing the path!
Am I still a Plex shill? BTW I run Jellyfin AND Plex. Literally side by side. Different uses for different cases because Jellyfin just can’t compete with Plex for sharing with dumb-ass relatives.
If anything above fails… you’re likely on the hook for support. Hope you plan for that!
It’s a self-hosted service so… Duh?
For people who can’t or don’t want to run a VPN app, Tailscale has the Funnel feature, which can… Funnel traffic into your Tailscale net.
I’ve only used it for light stuff so not sure how well it will work for video.
There are other Mesh VPN solutions out there - I’ve used Hamachi for close to 20 years on Windows, and it just works. There’s a Linux client too, though I haven’t worked with it in years.
Alternatively, you can setup a Raspberry Pi just for the Tailscale/Wireguard VPN, for say at your parents/friends houses. Cheap, simple solution, and it’ll handle DNS for the devices in the Tailscale mesh. This is something I’m doing for family/friends for unrelated/slightly related reasons (I’m reproducing the Backup to Friends feature that Crashplan used to have, so all of us can have multiple backups in our own “cloud”) , but they’ll get the side benefit of video, which won’t get backed up, just duplicated everywhere.
Don’t you need to set a static route in your router for that to work?
Hamachi definitely doesn’t work on TVs…
This is why when people say that FOSS is more secure than closed source I always laugh. Those people seem to think that because it’s open source that not only has it been reviewed in depth by security experts who know every single possible vulnerability, but that they found every vulnerability, fixed them, put in PRs that were then approved by the creator, who then made a new release with those fixes……. every time a new potential vulnerability is discovered in the libraries etc that it’s using.
Often it just leads to situations like this - known big vulnerabilities that are just never fixed.
It cuts both ways… Closed source things can be hiding shit… or simply never testing/caring about it… Oftentimes a truly interested person can externally test it and find the flaw anyway… but not always.
Where open source can have a lot of people who care about it… but never have the manpower to fix it.
The best open source projects are the one that have closed source backing it seems. I’ve had my company throw in resources into open source projects before because we used them.
But jellyfin and the likes would be hard to get backing for
FOSS isn’t always more secure than closed-source, but it absolutely can be.
It depends on the priorities of the maintainers. It seems like Jellyfin’s maintainers might not be putting a huge emphasis on security, which is very disappointing, but they are volunteers at the end of the day.
My assumption isn’t that they’re all fixed, it’s that any particularly bad ones would be known about so I know to avoid it or not. Which appears to be the case.
Imagine downvoting “Be careful what you expose to the internet”. I thought I’d got away from Reddit.
The core message is (to me) fine.
What I kind of dislike is the delivery.Btw: Can someone tell me why he path-guessing is so dangerous?
I don’t care if someone can guess the path forthe.rise.of.the.linux.ISO.720p.DD.H264.mp4and wants to download it.
Not like any damage or (interactive) intrusion was made into my networkBtw: Can someone tell me why he path-guessing is so dangerous?
Cause organizations like Sony have already done things like installed rootkits on people’s computer. Now imagine they realize this is a flaw in some media setups the their legal departments start actioning on it. (generate a rainbow table of common names for files, and common paths used in linux/docker containers… running 10000 http requests on a server over a few minutes is child’s play)
All it takes it one thing to parse on a list that never had a physical release and now your whole server will be subject to discovery at the court case.
If you have literally no illegal content on your server, no problem… other than that you’ll be on the hook to provide proof of rights to have the content… and possibly at worst rights to distribute (they accessed it without authentication, so literally anyone else could have too).
Edit: Oh but hold on! I hear you say that it would be illegal for them to scan your computer like that…
Except it isn’t. There’s no law that says you can’t try to navigate to a URL. There are laws that say that you can’t bypass attempts to authenticate/protect content… but remember the endpoint isn’t behind authentication.
I’m betting most of it is because some terminally online folks here have seen me post similar things before (the last time was like a month ago though… so I dunno)… So they think I’m some misinformation campaign or something. I don’t know. Anywhere I go on the internet it seems I trigger people by pointing out obvious things regularly. I just accept that society is fucked at this point.
Edit: Yup, went and doublechecked. Last post I posted about plex in was 1 month and 5 days ago… https://lemmy.ml/post/28376589
The before that… https://beehaw.org/post/19228632
https://beehaw.org/post/19211350All over a month ago… So I guess I must be a super shill to not even talk about plex for a whole month! I hope they don’t cancel my checks.
That’s based on the assumption that’s your only account, though. Not that I’m calling you a shill, just pointing out the obvious flaw in your logic. Any actual shill would have sockpuppets to spread out their comments and hide their history.
… Check my instance… Would be weird for me to shill for someone on my own instance that I’m an admin for, no? Wouldn’t I not shill for something directly on my admin profile? Also I think there’s one other mildly active user on my instance… Nobody else here to shill with.
I suppose I could make accounts on other instances… Nothing I could do to prove that isn’t the case… Just like I could say the same that all of lemmy is tankie bots.
What the other guy said. I repeat, I’m not actually calling you a shill. I even agree with your point about JF, I’m just pointing out your logic is faulty.
You’re just ignoring the point - we wouldn’t know that without doing some work, and it still doesn’t mean it isn’t being done.
I believe you when you say you aren’t doing it, but just like the issues with this reviewer, we just don’t know the extent.
Well then the obvious answer would be that if I had all these sock puppets… wouldn’t I just also upvote myself? Wouldn’t that make a malicious intent much more effective?
If your use case is to have a nice media sever at home and while traveling (via tailscale or similar) without exposing your private data, Jellyfin is great.
If your use case is running a pirate tv service for other people, then you probably want something else.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
Download file from Google Drive link
Download OpenVPN app
Pick file in OpenVPN app
Enter password
Share WiFi from phone to TV
Done
Too hard, she can’t even open a PDF file on her own.
You want to run an internet tv service for your MIL then do it. Thats just not want Jellyfin is for. Its a home media server.
Is this that hard to understand?
Then it’s not a drop in replacement for Plex, is it?
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.
Jellyfin is a home media server.
Ok, then why do they offer remote connectivity?
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.
What evidence of privacy problems do you have against Plex?
I’ve wiresharked, splunked, checked literally everything that I sent to Plex not all that long ago… Turns out it a whole fuckton of nothing and generic metadata pulled from the media agent. Turns out that as long as you turn off the dumb features, you’re not sending all that much. It’s much easier for me to tell people to turn that shit off than it is to convince them to install apps and configure everything.
I’m into self-hosting because data privacy is my primary concern.
Privacy won’t matter if a major studio catches wind of this type of vulnerability and decides to start scanning for jellyfin instances. The subpoenas will come shortly after.
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.
through re-sign-on after that latest update that forced it
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.
Yeah I don’t think anyone sane would disagree.
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.
The folder path explanation is news to me; time to obfuscate the hell out of that.
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.
This past week I switched my server to Jellyfin and migrated all my users over to it after I just happened across a thread a month ago about Plex charging for remote streaming on the 29th of April.
I never got an email from Plex about the change until April 29th… Scummy behaviour and I’m sure a lot of users and server owners bought their product in a panic as a result.
So far Jellyfin works perfectly, all my users are on Rokus and the app works perfectly on there.
Plex will only continue to get worse so I’m glad I made the jump.
So far Jellyfin works perfectly, all my users are on Rokus and the app works perfectly on there.
Considering that Roku doesn’t have a VPN option… Then I hope you’ve at least obfuscated your media paths so it’s not easily guessable on the complete unauthenticated endpoints for people to abuse/probe your server.
I keep an eye on my server and trust issues will be fixed in time as more and more users dump Plex.
Who knows what security issues Plex had and I ran that without issue. At least Jellyfin’s aren’t hidden.
Me wondering how many security issues the completely proprietary Plex has that they won’t tell us about.
Honestly this is something that needs to talked about more. I frequently see people roasting on foss but in reality the proprietary vendors have all sorts of dumb security issues.
The difference being, that the Plex devs weren’t confronted with a list of security issues and basically shrugged and dragged their feet for 5 years
How do you know that? Development happens behind closed doors.
The Jellyfin devs are “dragging their feet” because they do not want to break existing clients.
Fair concern… But I can tell you unauthenticated endpoints aren’t one. I haven’t tested any others personally.
Unauthenticated endpoints aren’t one as far as you can tell.
Just the same that we don’t know if the jellyfin ones don’t have further issues that people just haven’t found yet. What’s your point? One is known for 4+ years now and is a wontfix… the other is unknown and no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Without authentication; it’s possible to randomly generate UUIDs and use them to retrieve media from a jellyfin server. That’s about the only actually concerning issue on that list, and it’s incredibly minor IMO.
With authentication, users (ie, the people you have trusted to access your server) can potentially attack each other, by changing each others settings and viewing each other’s watch history/favorites/etc.
That’s it. These issues aren’t even worth talking about for 99.9% of jellyfin users.
Should they be fixed? Sure, eventually. But these issues aren’t cause to yell about how insecure jellyfin is in every single conversation, and to go trying to scare everyone off of hosting it publicly. Stop spreading FUD.
You shouldn’t expose it publicly
There are better ways to do things in 2025
<admits there are problems>
<Stop spreading FUD>
It’s not FUD if it’s real. I could say the same shit for people screaming Jellyfin at literally every chance they get when the topic is Plex. Instead I further the discussion rather than telling other people they’re spreading FUD.
it’s possible to randomly generate UUIDs
It’s an MD5 hash of the file path. Not randomly generated, and not a proper UUID.
Edit: for others that might not understand… Docker files will standardized the path side… *arr suites and general human nature will standardize the file name.
So a generally guessable file path exists for a LOT of users out there… It’s absolutely possible to guess that many people running jellyfin would store their version of bigbucksbunny as /movies/bigbuckbunny (2008)/bigbuckbunny.mkv or similar conventions and I’ve probably already nailed the path to generate the MD5 for a lot of people running Jellyfin just now.
Honestly it’s news to me but having read through those most of them are not an issue.
setup a VPN. Pray you don’t have a user on a device that doesn’t have a VPN app that you can work with.
Dafuck kind of a nitpick is this? In what world does OpenVPN not have an application for every device and OS combo out there fully supported? You tryna watch it on a VCR or smth?
LG tvs and rokus I know for a fact don’t have vpn apps available. And I’m sure there are plenty more.
Neither do Samsung, the jellyfin app works great on Samsung after the annoying process of installing it, but can’t put a VPN on it that I’m aware of.
WireGuard doesn’t work on AppleTV
Products like Netbird and Tailscale have the ability to act as an ingress node on the network.
Alternatively you could setup Wireguard and a simple http proxy like Caddy. Just give your relatives a box to plug into Ethernet. You could even use it as a backup target.
I am pretty positive you are a Plex shill too at this point…
Keep popping up every time somebody speaks good of jellyfin…
If there are really all those safety holes… Please explain why my publicly exposed instance never got hacked all these years.
And every time I speak up about it… I find users that never heard of it and want to learn how to reasonably fix it. And those discussion happen.
Example:
Am I a shill for talking about the risk of this specific software and even how to mitigate it with others? or am I a shill because you’re defensive over software that you happen to use/like?
How do you even know you were hacked? Are you monitoring the traffic?
Not that they’re really an issue unless you are exposing your server to untrusted clients. You shouldn’t be putting your servers on the Internet anyway, use a VPN.
I see this so often and nobody ever seems to realize that local/home VPNs use upload bandwidth, which for some is in dire low supply. I can’t have 4 full-time users using my upload connection routing through wireguard, when all 4 stream videos throughout the day. And that’s just 3rd party services like YouTube and Twitch, not plex. Then you add in two additional, off-site users who want to watch something with me on plex, and we are all given ~1.5 megabits a piece of a 10meg upload pipe over here. Mmmm, crispy pixels. ‘you can just use some IPs in wg so you don’t need to tunnel all data, just what you need’, they say, and I rebuke by showing them my dynamic IP address. ‘ask for a static one’ and they haven’t offered that for years besides enterprise customers.
And that’s before I ask everyone ‘so everyone download wireguard and scan your individual qr code, or I will send you the config file’ and everyone but a single user just hears the ocean. Then I need to teach them about VPNs, why we use it, why plex doesn’t work when the little lock isn’t showing on their phones, why ‘I had the lock in the corner but I couldn’t make a call or get online, so we are all getting [thing you don’t like] for dinner since I couldn’t ask’. Then I have to troubleshoot and tell them to toggle it off and on again…
The we get to the bit where they try to cast to the TV, and the chromecast is like ‘lol wtf is a VPN’ and we are back at square one, everyone hates me, I hate everyone right back, all changes from this experiment get reverted, and I lose credibility.
VPNs are useful, but I rage at people who assume they are a blanket solution for all situations and use-cases. And often, the people suggesting them are smug, like they have found something that nobody knows about and are superior because their situation doesn’t color outside of the lines.
Damn that was nice to vent. Been bothering me for way too damn long.
I had the lock in the corner but I couldn’t make a call or get online, so we are all getting [thing you don’t like] for dinner since I couldn’t ask’. Then I have to troubleshoot and tell them to toggle it off and on again…
“I’m sorry I made my collection of movies available for you to watch for free, I’ll make sure to never do anything like that again”
and everyone but a single user just hears the ocean.
I’m sorry, but this made me bust laughing. This is dead accurate for a few people in my life.
Then I have to troubleshoot and tell them to toggle it off and on again…
And this is exactly the type of support a lot of people just don’t want to do (including me). And the options really boil down to settle for supporting all this, or the risk of public access to unauthenticated endpoints.
They could just fix the endpoints and it’ll be a non-issue. But they won’t because “backwards compatibility”.
There are even other options that I can pre-emptively offer… but they all SUCK.
You can whitelist ip access… ISP ips rotate and are dynamic.
You can setup crowdsec and/or fail2ban… until a user fails to login a few times in a row because users are users and get themselves banned, now you’re back to support role.
VPNs already covered ad nauseam.There are options… they all suck, especially when the answer of JUST FIX THE ENDPOINT is sitting right there.
Upload is upload. It doesn’t matter if it’s over the plain Internet or over a tunnel, you’re still uploading roughly the same number of bytes per second.
You didn’t read anything I said, I see
Tunnels have overhead. MTU overhead itself can cut 5% of your total bandwidth as a default (1500 -> 1420). Forget all the side-channel control stuff.
MTU itself is an interesting issue for wireguard. It defaults to 1420, which should be fine in most cases as the default is 1500 for most ISP connections. But there are interesting cases where you need to go less… If you try to cram a 1420 MTU packet down a 1440 MTU ISP connection (you need 28Bytes overhead minimum, so would need 1412 in Wireguard in this case)… you’re rewriting a fuckton of packets and splitting tons of data that can ruin your connection speed (halving immediately).
I have seen some people recommend 1384 MTU before… The lower you tune this for compatibility the less speed you get.
Once again though… this is way over a normal users head. And likely even over yours since you don’t seem to recognize that this is happening and that it isn’t byte per byte the same.
You should expect wireguard to lose you 5% speed minimum… with other issues potentially making it worse.
Edit: clarification on a sentence cause the wording was bad.
use a VPN
No VPN apps for TVs. You know, the most likely thing older people would want to use to access your server to watch movies with.
Edit:
Not that they’re really an issue unless you are exposing your server to untrusted clients.
And the fact that many endpoints are completely unauthed…
My router (more accurately its software) has VPN support, using it for the whole network. You might be able to find one
Sure… but now you’re supporting their whole network because you need the vpn in place. It quickly becomes a whole thing of support just to let your cousin’s kid watch some old shows you have in your library.
Or if the my Internet goes down, now my relative’s Internet 7 states over stops working.
Well I was taking it gracefully as a split-vpn. But yeah it’s a fair question to have if it’s misconfigured, or relying on something in your network (Eg, maybe you also setup a pihole and they lost DNS resolution due to vpn going down.) God knows with these random half-features that many consumer “routers” that are out there.
Depending on their router and how much IT labor you care to do for these people you can actually configure a site to site VPN tunnel. All traffic for a particular address range will get routed through the VPN automatically.
It used to be a high end feature but it’s made it’s way into general routers since it doesn’t really require many resources and it lets you label it as having more home office features.
I do NOT want to support my MIL’s network which is 3000 miles away. It simply will not happen or work for either of us. Until Jellyfin has a decent way to support remote users, I simply cannot change her over.
If Plex folded or somehow forced my hand, I would just kick off all of my family and use Jellyfin on my local network. They’d hate losing access, and I’d hate them paying $$$ for a thousand streaming services, but at this point, that’s what would happen.
Honestly, you’re supporting a chunk of her network by being a media provider in the first place. “It won’t play” doesn’t usually come with an assurance that it’s not a device or network issue.
Neither plex nor jellyfin seem remotely worth the effort to provide to others in my opinion, I just felt like sharing that there are ways to afford network protection to locked down devices.
Amen.
Yup already addressed this in another thread.
You have to take on supporting them now… supporting family is just like loaning money to family… or renting to family… or anything else with family. Stressful.
But even silly problems like what happens when their wireguarded phone connect to the wireguarded home wifi vpn… I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t cause problems that you’re going to get blamed for.
But even then this is still jellyfins problem. It’s clear the platform is MEANT to be public, otherwise there would be some integration with these other features that just don’t exist.
I’ve got no real care for jellyfin one way or another, just sharing that there’s ways to make the network obey.
I think giving people access to my media server is asking for too much trouble personally. Now you’re dealing with forgotten passwords, people using your bandwidth at weird hours, and you basically become the media fairy, responsible for finding whatever it is people want, and then dealing with their issues when their device can’t codec at it for whatever janky reason.
I’m good at setting boundaries with family so it’s not stressful, just more annoying than I want to deal with.
use a VPN.
That’s difficult when most smart TVs / TV boxes don’t really have a VPN option.
Plex works just fine without a VPN.
Jellyfin really needs to work on security and server discovery.
As it is right now you have to manually input the server URL unless it’s on the same physical network, discovery won’t even work with broadcasts across VLANs, or over the internet.
It doesn’t even work right on the same net sometimes.
I think the better answer would be to not expose Jellyfin to the internet.
Although it would be cool if it integrated with something like p2panda or libp2p
It loses a massive feature that Plex has and does really well in that case.
And with that it loses any edge it had over Plex. If I have to install a VPN on every device of every user, just because the project wont adhere to basic security practices, then I will not switch to it.
Am I correct that there is no first party Jellyfin app for AppleTV?
There is not, but Infuse is what the Jellyfin project officially recommends.
There is Jellyfin, Swiftfin, and Infuse - the latter being 3rd party, but its my favourite so far in terms of stability :)
If I remember right I tried to do the Infuse free trial but either Apple or Infuse was choking on processing the trial request and I could never use it.
If you use plex and jellyfin anyway, i suggest checking raspberry pi and kodi (libre elec) as an alternative. The pi4 is fine for hd at least, some use it for 4k but i have no exp with that. It works well and helps you get off the apple ecosphere.
Correct, but there is an Emby app for every device.
Emby is a paid service right?
Yes. But there is a different option. There’s a list of clients on the website.
Correct and what I’ve seen from Jellyfin / Emby are poor looking at best. While I could cobble together a system that works for me, there’s no way anyone I share with would put up with it. Plex is PLEX for a reason.
“Better”
Maybe if they’d fix their glaring security issues
Or their convoluted settings. When there’s a github project that does the HW encoding settings for you, you know it’s intuitive…
I don’t count this as fake. He most certainly uses the software and the features he described are actually features under plex pass. And I no doubt believe he enjoys it. No lies here. My experience with plex pass is the same lol.
I think the point being made is that company staff shouldn’t be leaving five-star reviews on products they, themselves, work on. Whether they do it because they love the product, or a company suit told them to. Personally, I think it’s fine to try and convince people to use your/your company’s software, but giving yourself a five-star review to do so is downright pathetic.
Mostly without being transparent, and stating they work for the company.
I’m fully okay with them doing so, but they have to disclose what they’re doing so. Like the fact that the review didn’t disclose that they were an employee is very sketchy to me.
They seriously enshitified the download feature. You used to be able to set it to download X number of unplayed episodes. Then it would manage downloading fresh content for you as you watched stuff. Now you have to manually download each and every episode yourself. This was literally the killer feature Plex had over Jellyfin for me.
Oh, ffs, really? That’s kind of the reason for a download feature.
Pricks.
I think they’re getting pressure re the pirating aspect. I could imagine the bigger they get the bigger the magnifying glass will be held up to them. They’re probably doing some fancy footwork to be able to remain in production / avoid lawsuits and similar pressure.
Sure, that’s why they keep adding features people don’t want. But gimping one of their key paid features makes no sense to me.
I would imagine its harder to argue you don’t condone your users using it for piracy when you have a feature that automatically does stuff very closely related to piracy. I’m not going to get into an argument over whether it’s defensible legally or not, but it makes sense to me that they play it safe in general.
Yeah fair enough, and I do agree. I only reused the title of the forum post where this was originally posted. Have changed the title up now.
I do think he should’ve been a little forthcoming in his review, however
If he was forthcoming in his review, it would have been to obvious that it’s a breach of the ToS. Workers are not permitted to review apps made by their own company.
This is 100% a shady review.
Did not know that. Yeah bad practice then
“Reviews” but there’s only one.
This is probably some employee who genuinely likes the U.I.
An actual company-sponsored campaign would NOT use names from actual employees.
Corporations drill it deep into your head that you do not positively promote your own products or negatively review competitor products without both making it clear that you (1) work for $Corp; and (2) are sharing your own, personal opinion.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to Plex, they suck at training employees about social media policies.
Are we even sure it’s the same person?
“Plex respects their employees autonomy” wow really??
Mobile app reviews are worthless anyway.
Is it fake or just a review by an employee that uses plex?
Yeah, I`m all for roasting Plex but nothing about that review is inappropriate or prima facie untruthful.
It’s inappropriate because you’re not allowed to review your own companies software, let alone do so without declaring as such.
Who says you’re not allowed to?
Google ToS
ou’re not allowed to review your own companies software
Says who? They can still be a user of it.
Google says you can’t. It’s a violation of their ToS.
The update makes the download feature objectively worse. So, that was a stretch to praise both.
I’m not a fan of Plex and switched to Jellyfin very early on, but I’m a bit confused by the outrage here. He used his real name to report on a UX he built. I see FOSS developers do this all the time, and it seems pretty innocuous.
I can imagine if he generated thousands of anonymous accounts and did the same it’d be very bad, but an author commenting on his own work using his full real name doesn’t seem like a conspiracy plot
It isn’t terrible but it isn’t great
It would’ve been better if he gave a disclaimer
In addition: Sharing this post form r/selfhosted which also describes the recent Plex situation lately, worth a read.
What do ya know, yet another day of being happy I never invested in Plex
Yet again Plex is an amazing example of how people become more angry because they give things away for free.
If everything required a Plex pass less people would be angry.
Just use want you want.
I personally don’t see a reason to use Plex over Jellyfin. Apparently some people agree since Jellyfin made bank from donations.
A lot of the angst about the server requirements for Plex pass really have to stretch the truth to become a victim. It only affects you if you were using it for free, in which case 🤷, it was free, it’s hard to feel bad about it.
The only thing I’m disappointed in is the free mobile streaming comes at the same time they released the new broken app. When they get around to fixing the app I’ll be able to tell my friends they can now use the app. The server owner paying once is much better than every person paying for the app.
Never thought I’d see the hate for plex on here get to this level.
Every update they’ve made for just about the past decade has made the product worse for the original users who just want to stream their own media. This last UI update killed my favorite download feature. They deserve the hate they’re getting.
That’s what happens when you piss off a loyal fan base
it’s almost as if a small group of people are desperately trying to make people change to jellyfin.
6 months ago I was seriously looking at jellyfin as a Plex alternative. Now? nah, I’m good.
I’ll take a corporate shitheel company over a roach infested toxic community any day.
the more they push the less I want anything to do with jellyfin, and the leaders at jellyfin should be made aware of what their community members are doing.
I’ll take a corporate shitheel company over a roach infested toxic community any day.
What an asinine fucking take. Even if Plex were better than Jellyfin in every single way (it isn’t), this take would still be asinine. I mean, wtf dude. You can just not care about the community and everything keeps working. A “shitheel” company will do everything to make your experience suck.
You can just not care about the community and everything keeps working. A “shitheel” company will do everything to make your experience suck.
And a toxic shitheel community won’t do that?
it’s comments like yours that makes me feel vindicated in choosing corporate over FOSS, and I know I’m not the only one.
Thanks for doing your part in proving my point.
No. You know you don’t need to join a community for using something, right? I didn’t join a community for my dishwasher. Not even for most of my apps, actually. It’s very easy. When you choose corporate, you’re giving money for shit service. There’s literally no way for dissociate from that. On the other hand, you can simply not participate in a community, no one’s forcing you. It’s just weird that you’d still prefer the corporate way.
yes please explain to me what I have to do.
that’s not toxic behavior at all! /s
I’m not a member of the Plex community, never have been. I expect the service to be tailored to make the company a profit. That’s literally all I can trust them to do.
so what can I trust the jellyfin community to do? right now they’re toxic as fuck towards me because I’m telling them they’re being toxic as fuck. the software they built could be the most beautiful and elegant solution in the whole world. but…I’ll never know that because I can’t get past being vilified for calling an apple an apple.
Jellyfin, get your shit together or you will never get past the whole “Plex is shitty” phase.
winners don’t care about winning, they only care about being the best they can be. maybe focus on more of that and less shitting on Plex for doing whatever they’re doing.
I’m not a member of the Plex community, never have been.
so what can I trust the jellyfin community to do?
Clear double standards. Just use the product if you want to.
yes please explain to me what I have to do.
Alright, man. Do what you want. I’m just pointing out that you have a weird double standard, ffs. Have a great day. (Or maybe not, I don’t wanna tell you what to do.)
maybe focus on more of that and less shitting on Plex
Also, you seem to be happy to tell people what they need to do. (I realize I’m being petty and annoying here, but that’s kinda on purpose for this one. I get pretty fucking frustrated by double standards.)
My original comment wasn’t telling anyone what to do.
I was telling the jellyfin community what I was going to do. y’all didn’t like that too much though did ya?
then you came at me calling my comments asinine while attacking my position that the community is toxic as fuck by telling me to “ignore the problem”. yeah, thanks for telling me what I should do.
when I pointed out that your comment is exactly the kind of toxic shit I can’t support, what’d you do? you doubled down and told me more of what I should do!
thanks, if I need bad advice I know where to go now.
the only time I said what anyone should do, it was addressed to the whole jellyfin community as a fucking favor because y’all are a toxic bunch of snowflakes that are clearly too emotionally immature to understand you’re alienating outsiders and killing the jellyfin brand.
I guess the point that you’re not understanding is that I expect Plex to abuse me. I know what their motives are. All I know from jellyfin is that if you even mention “Plex”, the community will come out of the basements they hibernate in and shit down your throat for even suggesting anything other than jellyfin.
Jesus fucking Christ you guys! look at yourselves! how about y’all read your comments to your spouses or mothers and see if they think you’re a bunch of toxic assholes. you obviously won’t listen to reason from a stranger.
shit man, I don’t even fucking care about your asshole project enough to get this deep in comments. I just believe that FOSS deserves a better community than these shitheels.
A large group of people got pissed off at all the enshitification of Plex. It isn’t a personal attack and you are welcome to keep using Plex. However, it is evident that many are looking towards Jellyfin as a better alternative.
You clearly have not been in a lot of Plex/Jellyfin threads. Using Plex is often portrayed as some kind of capital sin by hardcore Jellyfin fans.
I’m also in the boat of letting people use what they want, but the discussion is usually not made in good faith
but the discussion is usually not made in good faith
“Everybody who disagrees with me is a troll or a shill.”
Sure, buddy, because Free Software projects run by volunteers famously have huge guerilla marketing budgets. Won’t somebody think of the poor for-profit companies who first got their leg up by taking Free Software code they didn’t write and then subsequently gradually closed and enshittified it? They’re the real victims here.
