ARE YOU F’ING KINDING ME!!! Your DB goes on vacation and every Plex user is unable to use the software!. Nice work you idiots. I pay for access to you updates and support not your DB going to the Fiji Islands for a stiff drink. You just got to love a dictatorship. “Without me your F’ed. See you when I return” My entire Plex setup was offline and inaccessible. Could not even login to my PMS.
I am going to put aside my massive list of complaints with your software and pretend your apps are bug free. Ugh, this is going to be hard. Okay, I’m, focused, I can do this, bug free!!!
Lets just say some lonely, bored out his mind hacker in Belize decide to over-through you and does some redirects and simply intercepts the login to your web site and steals everyone’s passwords (didn’t this happen not to long ago). Ok I 'm not a hacker and do not know the lingo, nor do I condone such activity. So this single point of failure called “plex.tv” is a “BIG PROBLEM” One, if a hacker gets in they potential have access to all of our stuff (e.g. picture, videos - of the me and the wife doing it, and what ever else we store on our PMS) Awesome, the “Personal Identifiable Information Act” just got a big f*cking.
I think Plex needs to let users have control over their content. They need to change this control to a user centric model where you can link in your Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft account (e.g. OneDrive) or what ever account directly to your PMS. This way your PMS will login to the cloud account of your choice and if your are savvy enough and setup your own DynDNS account you can redirect your device externally to your PMS server.
You should have the choice of who is the central control of your content.
@nilesfoster said:
ARE YOU F’ING KINDING ME!!! Your DB goes on vacation and every Plex user is unable to use the software!. Nice work you idiots. I pay for access to you updates and support not your DB going to the Fiji Islands for a stiff drink. You just got to love a dictatorship. “Without me your F’ed. See you when I return” My entire Plex setup was offline and inaccessible. Could not even login to my PMS.
@Elijah_Baley. Respectively. I think you are missing the point. I used to have “Popcorn hour” boxes scattered throughout my house until a friend showed me Plex. I live “in the sticks” with a lousy internet connection at the best of times and therefore my media server was my solution to not being able to stream Netflix etc. Up until tonight I never realized that by Plex going down, or possibly my internet connection crapping out that I wouldn’t be able to stream my own content that I have paid for? Plex is a great service but I have never wanted my media library to be under someone elses “control” (for lack of a better word).
@Elijah_Baley, I’m certain the OP is talking about the Plex Home and Managed Users. Something needs to be added to the support pages regarding the requirement for an active internet connection if you have created a Plex Home with Managed Users. If you have that (as I do), and you lose internet, then you lose access to your Plex server. This has been brought up in forum posts, but nothing exists on the support pages to explain the requirement.
@lmnagel said: @Elijah_Baley. Respectively. I think you are missing the point. I used to have “Popcorn hour” boxes scattered throughout my house until a friend showed me Plex. I live “in the sticks” with a lousy internet connection at the best of times and therefore my media server was my solution to not being able to stream Netflix etc. Up until tonight I never realized that by Plex going down, or possibly my internet connection crapping out that I wouldn’t be able to stream my own content that I have paid for? Plex is a great service but I have never wanted my media library to be under someone elses “control” (for lack of a better word).
But it is not under anyone’s control but yours. For me everything I own works fine with no internet. It is just a matter of choosing your devices correctly. But, even if you completely lose access for a period of time it is not truly important. It is just TV not life or death. This is also true for the “home” features. It just is not that important and certainly not worth throwing the tantrum that the OP did.
I am not about to, and should not have to, redirect to the internal IP of my PMS. How is that even remotely intuitive?
No one should be subjected to someone else’s control. However, there is a place for certain data as long as it is not impacted by an outage. I own a subscription to Office 365 but MSFT is far bigger than Plex and they have mountains of redundancy. Even if they go offline I still have access to my data and if I want to cancel my “cloud” services with them I can take my data else where or keep it on-prem. Outlook will still open and I can get to my emails. Word will still open and I can get to my documents, etc.
The point I am trying to make is that Plex is a very interactive product, more so than Office 365, and when the one link in the chain breaks your stuck with nothing. This model simply does not work. Now not everyone has a static IP, not even I. So if you setup your PMS with that IP and then it changes you loose connection to your PMS. Plex.tv is just the proxy to your PMS from the Internet so that your mobiles devices can get access to your PMS.
Ok, I get, but one Plex.tv should not be needed if I want to access my PMS within the confines of my home, two Plex should allow us to connect to another cloud service of our choice (e.g. OneDrive) to proxy (login) to our PMS, and/or for the more knowledgeable people to allow them to have free rain on their PMS setup and let them use a dynamic DNS service such DynDNS with a registered domain. Domain registration is super cheap as long as you are not using a three letter domain.
kegobeer-plex, I agree that this is not a life or death situation. However, the matter of life and death does not occur that often for me, so you comparison is not hold much value. Either your configuration is set up differently from mine our your account was not affected during the outage.
The main point that I am trying to drive here is that Plex needs to lot go of the control they have over our content. Their model is weak and is not acceptable and no I am not throwing tantrum. I am trying to help/educate the end user community that may not be aware or understand how this model works and how it affects them as the content owners . If not me then someone else would have post something of the same.
Apparently there several other users who feel the same as I do. I used the “Awesome undocumented feature!” for the title of my post to draw attention as most user may not care about the outage so much as it was a brief moment in time, but most user might be interested in something cool and newly discovered in the Plex world and to be honest even though the title is miss leading, I believe most people have changed their attention to something more important than some cool undocumented feature.
I sent diagnostic logs to the dev a little while ago because I found that I was not able to connect to my PMS. I decided to dig into the logs and I find a lot of errors point to plex.tv URLs.
Kind of to my point as to why Plex needs to release control. This would be at least one potential weak link removed that would provide a better experience for the end user community.
I wasn’t the one who said anything about life or death. I suggested that the internet requirement for Plex Home needed to be put in the official support documents.
@lmnagel said:
I guess this is just going to be ignored in the hopes it goes away? Does anyone know WHY Plex has set it up this way?
New kind of DRM.
How else would they ensure that you dont sign up for 1 month of PlexPass, create all your ‘Plex Home’ users and then use the feature for years?!
I’ve asked about Internet requirement of ‘Plex Home’ the day feature was launched. Never gotten response ( one that actually made sense ). I shouldnt need ‘a server for my server’.
ARE YOU F’ING KINDING ME!!! Your DB goes on vacation and every Plex user is unable to use the software!
I’m very sorry about the downtime. Sadly, no service can claim to be perfect, so we have to engineer around this. The media server, for example, keeps cached locally all of the account/auth information and can perform perfectly during any outages which occur. The iOS app, on the other hand, had a terrible bug where it signed the user out when it got an unexpected response from plex.tv. This is not by design, but a stupid mistake, and we fixed it. In addition, we’ve made it a top priority for our QA team to use a simulated offline cloud service to ensure all our apps operation correctly. But “every Plex user is unable to use” is just not true; many of the apps do the same as the server and will continue to function fine during any outages.
ARE YOU F’ING KINDING ME!!! Your DB goes on vacation and every Plex user is unable to use the software!
I’m very sorry about the downtime. Sadly, no service can claim to be perfect, so we have to engineer around this. The media server, for example, keeps cached locally all of the account/auth information and can perform perfectly during any outages which occur. The iOS app, on the other hand, had a terrible bug where it signed the user out when it got an unexpected response from plex.tv. This is not by design, but a stupid mistake, and we fixed it. In addition, we’ve made it a top priority for our QA team to use a simulated offline cloud service to ensure all our apps operation correctly. But “every Plex user is unable to use” is just not true; many of the apps do the same as the server and will continue to function fine during any outages.
Thanks for the helpful reply. I know needing an internet connection at all is contentious but, and I speak for myself here, it makes me much happier knowing you’re going to handle this case during QA. Should mitigate any future issues!
@lmnagel said: @Elijah_Baley. Respectively. I think you are missing the point. I used to have “Popcorn hour” boxes scattered throughout my house until a friend showed me Plex. I live “in the sticks” with a lousy internet connection at the best of times and therefore my media server was my solution to not being able to stream Netflix etc. Up until tonight I never realized that by Plex going down, or possibly my internet connection crapping out that I wouldn’t be able to stream my own content that I have paid for? Plex is a great service but I have never wanted my media library to be under someone elses “control” (for lack of a better word).
I feel your pain brother but i have been told that the TV’s have no choice but to operate like that. Sounds fishy i know but i do not have the code to look at so i have to take their word for it. To solve this issue… I picked up a cheap Roku and that’s been my savior when plex.tv is down. It continues to work. I also bought the Plex app for it and do not use my plex pass.
Now what makes me mad is that you can go weeks or longer without an answer to a question. The Vizio app gets updated and breaks the service but there is no info from Messley on the update. He has gotten better but still it’s far from perfect. If you send an update that breaks us… my not recall the update and roll back? You just did this a month ago or so.
I pay monthly for this and been doing so for 2 years. I think it’s great and love being able to watch my movies when i want where i want and how i want. So i pay monthly instead of getting a life time pass. In the long wrong Plex will make out better. But I do grow tired of the outages…
Why is the thread hidden from the main page? I only found it because it was listed as the lost post.
But if you enter for forum this thread is not visible.
@kegobeer-plex said:
Something needs to be added to the support pages regarding the requirement for an active internet connection if you have created a Plex Home with Managed Users.
You’re totally correct (though it’s actually not related to “Managed Users” as such - the same limitation applies to using Fast User Switching with full Plex accounts that are members of your Home). The support articles have been updated.
It’s also worth pointing out here that it’s only a limitation on switching. Apps should cache info for the last-used user so that you can still access an app with that user, even if you’re offline. If an app’s not doing that, then it would be a bug and we’d obviously want to fix it.
@Starrion said:
Why is the thread hidden from the main page? I only found it because it was listed as the lost post.
But if you enter for forum this thread is not visible.
The forum software automatically “buries” Discussion/Questions topics that receive a certain threshold of negative reactions (“bury” is the forum terminology here, but itbasically just means that new posts no longer “bump” it in the list). In this case, the original post has 2 Dislike and 6 WTF, which is sufficient to trigger the automatic forum behavior. No one is actively “suppressing” this topic or anything.
Elan, I stand corrected. I cannot say "“every Plex user is unable to use” but still the fact remains that if Plex.tv is not available, “I” cannot access “my” content. Currently as I see it you are the Gate Keeper and if you fail, I lose out.
There are to many obstacle between my PMS and Plex.tv that can break. For me, there is about 14 hops, so to be conservative lets say there are 14 possible points of failure. We both know that number is much higher which begs to argue why PMS and Plex apps should not be, or at least our choice, dependent on Plex.tv. There needs to be an options to completely island our configuration if was so choice to and an option to proxy through another repository (e.g. OneDrive. which a lot of WP apps do) if we so choose to take the route.
The world today is more about personal choices and ownership. Hence why we can take our phone numbers to any phone service of our choosing. Smartphone are now part of this too, the “unlocked” market is growing immensely because we as humans want to keep things. Our Plex environment is the same . We do not want to feel that we are under a dictatorship and that we must comply with only Plex.tv.
Do not get me wrong, I think that Plex.tv is a great option for many Plex users, but for those who have the knowledge, or just simply want to consolidate their point of authentication and/or proxy, configure DDNS and firewall policies should have the right to choose to do so if they want.
I am a Life Time member so you have nothing to gain from me as a subscriber. I would happily pay the $150 and do my own redirects. Others may not have the knowledge or even care to deal with registering a domain, setting up DDNS and firewall policies and would be happy to pay Plex a monthly/annual fee to proxy through Plex.tv.
Here is a possible working model in regards to a revenue stream. This is just an example.
Monthly Plex Pass $1.99 / Annual Plex Pass $19.99. Gives you access to early release and access to Plex.tv proxy.
2.Purchase Plex one time for $150 and get access to major releases only and no access to Plex.tv proxy. Ideal for advanced users with knowledge to setup domain registration, DDNS, firewall policies or wish to proxy through another cloud service such as OneDrive or DropBox.
Purchase Plex one time for $150 and $0.99 for Monthly Plex Pass / Annual Plex Pass $9.99. Gives you access to early release but no access to Plex.tv proxy. Ideal for advanced user with knowledge to setup domain registration, DDNS, firewall policies or wish to proxy through another cloud service such as OneDrive or DropBox but also wish to have the latest in bleeding edge Plex awesomeness.
