metrics.plex.tv

General Discussions
1

Why did Plex change from metrics.plex.tv in 1.9.4 to something else in 1.9.5 for their statistics gathering? I’m not looking to start another firestorm just curious to why.

2

If you opt out of sending optional playback data here (Bitrate, Duration, Resolution, Offset, Completion Status) you shouldn’t see any metrics.plex.tv connections anymore.

However since Plex is still collecting non-anonymized playback data (tied to your account) even if you opt out of optional playback data, you need to block analytics.plex.tv as well.

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I’ve checked my PiHole Log and besides analytics.plex.tv and metrics.plex.tv there is nothing you can block without affecting functionality.

Personally I also added news.provider.plex.tv because there are no german news outlets yet so it currently has no value to me.

1 Like
3

I had metrics.plex.tv blacklisted in pihole but after the 195 update I never seen any entry blocks. Today I downgraded to 194 and metrics is back which leads to believe they changed to some other avenue.

Thanks for the headsup about analytics.plex.tv!

4

Would still be curious as to what they changed it to! and Why!

5

@Wiidesire thanks for the 3 addresses you provided. Promptly blocked.

6

Anybody knows how to block “URLs” (DNS entries?) instead of IPs in linux? Like with ufw? :slight_smile:

7

Be careful blocking news.provider.plex.tv as it will have unintended results…

8

@Achilles said:
Be careful blocking news.provider.plex.tv as it will have unintended results…
Which is what? No news category is plopping up in the Android TV interface, haven’t seen any side effects.

10

@flow said:

@Coxeroni said:
Anybody knows how to block “URLs” (DNS entries?) instead of IPs in linux? Like with ufw? :slight_smile:

Sorry, I don’t know. But you can try to use your hosts file… Just as an idea…

That would be easy, thanks for the hint :slight_smile:

11

@Coxeroni said:
Anybody knows how to block “URLs” (DNS entries?) instead of IPs in linux? Like with ufw? :slight_smile:

I don’t know any out-of the box solution. But it should be fairly easy: just write a script that reloads the iptables rules once a day. That script can than do a dns lookup and do the substitution.

Other option: I’m running a central dns server for my home-network on my firewall. I’ve configured it in a way that e.g. metrics.plex.tv always translates into 127.0.0.1… Basically the same that Pi-Hole does.
Alternative: you can still write the above translation locally into the hosts file and change resolv.conf to look into that before doing a dns lookup.