Ohhh, ok, I see Orko’s thinking. Plex is selling (“advertising”) a feature of the Plex Pass (intro skip). To people without their own server, this feature requires someone else with a server to do compute cycles to generate intro markers on their videos so that this server-less person can use the pass feature.
A bit roundabout thinking here though. It’s far more likely to cost the server owner more compute cycles and electricity to stream the video to this server-less moocher than it was to generate the intro markers.
Generating preview thumbnails is rather cpu intensive, streaming costs hardly any cpu.
It’s not the cost of the power, it doesn’t really matter, it’s a cool feature, I use it daily, I generate it anyways.
It’s the audacity to sell something they don’t have control over, the audacity to sell my cpu/power investment. They made a conscious decision to sell it to the client not to the server.
Probably similar(idk, I don’t use it) to download, which is client side paid now to instead of server side as sync was.
It’s an example of a broader change in direction from plex inc from a cool company to something Linus criticises.
All of your complaints are all controlled server-side.
If thumbnails are not important to you, then tell it not to generate any. A friend viewing your content will NEVER force your server to generate thumbnails, only the server owner can. If you have the thumbnails generated already, are you complaining that your friend can now make use of them?
If intro/outro are not important to you, then do not generate the markers. A friend viewing your content will NEVER force your server to generate intro markers, only the server owner can. If you have the intro markers generated already, are you complaining that your friend can now make use of them?
If downloading is not important to you, do not allow anyone to download your files. A friend viewing your content can NEVER download a file of yours without your giving them permission to.
(That said, I do agree it is strange that Plex moved the ability to download files over to those who have a Pass, regardless of the server owner’s Pass status).
I’m trying to understand, I really am. I guess I’m just too dense to read what you didn’t type out to figure out your issue.
I would be concerned if Plex is putting a load on my server to the benefit of someone else, when I didn’t say I was ok with it. So far from what I can understand of your posts though, I am missing the point.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the media server side of Plex continues to fall the back of the companies priorities. The majority of Plex users now don’t even use it as a media server and Plex is consistently advertising their free content. Sucks for those who have purchased lifetime passes like I have expecting features to work, when they flat out don’t. Makes me regret not waiting for the sales…
A lot of this has to do with PLEX trying to shed itself of the image that they are the pirate’s best friend. Let’s face it, the ability to stream your content to someone else is highly questionable from a legal standpoint. Plex knows this and so do the Feds. To get past that they are doing everything they can to show they are mostly a streaming content service.
I certainly think you’re over-analyzing it. Think of Plex like an emulator, an area that has had extensive legal contention over. Plex doesn’t offer the movies for your media server (aside from the free content they license lol), you have to own the movies and dump them, or illegally download them if you feel like breaking the law! Plex does not endorse breaking the law, why would they? Plex has no control in how you view the content or where you get the content from. If you buy a DVD copy of a movie and screen it to your whole extended family, the police aren’t gonna come knocking down your door. Same thing with Plex. This is simply a case of Plex, as a media server, not being as profitable as it would be as a live streaming service. They have investors that wish to see growth and ROI.
I’m not sure what the parameters were for his failed Android downloads. I use Android and download to my device anytime I’m travelling and a couple of times when a storm knocked out the power; (running on backup power I downloaded the stuff I wanted to watch to my fully charged phone before safely shutting down my server)
The only time I had an issue was when something happened to the server (the machine not PMS) causing PMS to fail during maintenance and I couldn’t restart the service after booting the machine in the morning. I had to restore an older (by a day or so) version of the server that didn’t have a library I had created before the crash and after the last backup. It was a little difficult deleting the stuff I had downloaded. Signing out on my phone and back in allowed me to do it.
In fact, when people say “Downloads don’t work” I think it will be useful to share the parameters they use, Device, client, codec preferences, quality preference, hardware transcoding status, and other things that might affect the transcoding. That way it will be easier to reproduce for the team working on said features or for anyone else to reproduce to see if it is a widespread problem.
I think somehow it would always have been like this. I have my brothers, cousins and a couple of friends connecting to my server. Only one of those has a server of his own (2 servers in his case); and of those he shared with there are only 2 with servers. So it was always likely that most people would have it to connect to a private server run by someone else and not to actually run their own server. I was using Plex for a few years before deciding to setup my own home server.
I do understand that now a lot of people are using the free streaming services they offer. Good for them I guess. I have one cousin I added to my server but he hasn’t streamed anything from me because he discovered some content that Plex has (and I don’t) that he likes so when he’s done with that he’ll hit my server up. Another cousin on the other hand watches only stuff that I host because I found a place that could digitize the VHS recordings of old shows we used to watch and record when we were kids and he watches that all the time. He used to make fun of me for holding on to the VHS tapes in the era of DVDs and now he can’t find that content anywhere else.
In any case, I imagine that Plex’s free shows are running on one massive instance of Plex Media Server so, in a way, they’ll be making changes and improvements to it and given that, it shouldn’t be a stretch to have them release some of those features/improvements to folks who run their own servers. This way, they now dogfood the service themselves and should face the same problems first hand at a larger scale. An example is the outro detection. The article that introduced it said it’s already there in their hosted content and they are giving the go ahead for some to join the beta to provide further testing before it becomes generally available.
Lol. A friend of mine keeps speaking of the shadowy places of Plex. That’s because the first time he heard of it someone he knows had been paying €6/month to access a giant library that had a few thousand users by his account. It got shut down a couple of months ago.
The way some people could see it is if they don’t provide content, and seeing that piracy is an issue, they could be seen to be/accused of aiding the pirates in distribution of ill gotten content.
Fixing downloads is my #1 complaint. I travel for work a lot, and Plex’s successful download of videos onto Android is about 25%. Sometimes it just errors out and nothing happens. Sometimes it says it’s trying but gets nowhere. Sometimes it straight-up lies and says the video is downloaded, but it isn’t.
I bought a plex pass because I want to support a great product. But this feels like I’ve been lied to.
Been debating a switch to Jellyfin for a long time. After years of annoyance, it might be time.
