DRM (Digital Rights Management) integration into Plex.

Feature Suggestions
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Firstly what is DRM? - “Digital rights management (DRM) is a systematic approach to copyright protection for digital media. The purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized redistribution of digital media and restrict the ways consumers can copy content they’ve purchased”

Regardless of what proprietary DRM system is used to protect digital content, DRM is now a fact of life. ANY digital media not produced by the general public for use on things like Facebook or Youtube etc, or released under creative commons will have some form of DRM incorporated into it.

After reading pretty much every PLEX discussion on this topic, the general answer is “PLEX will never play DRM content”. Any of you who have been around the PLEX community for as long as I have, have noticed how PLEX has matured to be without a doubt, the BEST software digital media system ever written. Its now being integrated into more and more digital content players (hardware and software) and can pretty much be used on anything with a display…

So with such and incredible system like PLEX, why hasn’t it become the default standard? - Because its achilles heal is the fact it doesn’t support 80% of the digital content in the world, which has some form of DRM protection. For PLEX to survive and grow in 2016 onwards, that needs to change.

I know this feature request is very complicated, due to ownership and copyright issues with the different media outlets and their propriety DRM systems, however all I am asking is for the PLEX developers to put DRM back on the discussion table and start to research ways of incorporating DRM (which ever methods) into PLEX.

I pay for my DRM content - no problems with that at all. What I do find ridiculous is those DRM media providers who make you use their proprietary software/hardware to view that DRM content. Because of that, Plex cannot be my one and only media hub.

In conclusion, lets vote on this issue and see if PLEX can grow to be the “one and only media solution” we will need.

Again, if viewing DRM content in PLEX requires some sort of royalty or copyright payment to the actual media producer, I have no issues in paying via a premium channel, plugin, Plex Pass or even proof of cable subscription!

People, lets make this happen…

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I’m not so sure that Plex needs DRM implemented into its core program since I seriously doubt it will get the native capabilities that would be dependent on DRM to such a degree. Personally I believe that those capabilities would come in the form of plugins/channels and thus the DRM can be implemented in those plugins/channels.

I would love to have Plex as my single stop to everything content but the fact is that even if they do implement the underlying DRM schemes from different content producers/distributor that does not make it legal (in some parts of the world) or even possible to play that content inside Plex without the content producers/distributors explicit permission. And that is a bigger problem than DRM imo.

I think we have to take this on a case by case basis rather than just a “general DRM” basis, and the only case I can see right now would be local DVD/BR playback.

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2021 clean-up: