Why? What do you hope to achieve?
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Kinda funny how Plex is killing itself.
I got the mail, confirmed it is true and startet to transition to JellyFin.
Plex Pass literally canceld the same day. DonĀ“t see the point in paying money to a company that donĀ“t know how to treat its customers.
Used Hetzner to have my Library available on the go and can share it with my family but plex didnĀ“t want my money.
And just for the lulzā¦ there are already scripts that can work around this block as soon as they start blocking this ips.
DonĀ“t know why they even try this. Even a simple VPN script will bring Hetzner back online with plex and they cant ban every vpn in existens.
As a small sample: You could even pipe Plex through your home network and still got it running on hetzner.
And now: go Plex delete my post cuz you dont have the right knowledge to get the users with illigal intentions and screw you loyal customers over.
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So you supposedly can easily address the hosting issue and yet you are deciding to switch to an inferior offering, Jellyfin. OK. Hope it works well for you.
Iāve been using JF side by side with Plex for some time.
Edit - I did say I was going to avoid this thread but some of the posts are just so hilarious.
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My point was to say you can easily bypass this.
JF isnĀ“t what i want to use but i donĀ“t want to support the fact that Plex ist screwing its customers over.
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Hey everybody can do what he wants and i just switching 
If you wanna stay and let them screw with you than so it is.
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Plex has a real problem theyāre attempting to solve here. Iāve seen their solution described as incompetent, stupid, lazy, ineffectual, criminal, unethical, immoral, etc., just off the top of my head.
Theyāve been accused of taking the easy way out instead of cracking down on the real offenders (which is suggested they could easily do; though the data required to investigate these violations would almost certainly be verboten via their own policies). Almost in the same breath, itās been suggested that theyāve committed data privacy violations warranting investigation by authorities responsible for investigation of such violations.
Itās been suggested that it should be investigated how they might potentially be violating the GPL, a license upon which some of their independent software components is authored. No real accusations are levied, just the idea that āwe should find a way to hold them accountableā via the GPL.
Thatās not mentioning the threats to move to other media server platforms (an idea which I wholly support, and wish that some of you would just get on with). Hollow threats are hollow.
The recurring theme is āIām angry, and I want to punish Plex for it.ā
However, should Hetzner (and potentially other hosting platforms) not bear some of the blame for this? In (what I think was) my first post in this thread, I suggested a hypothetical where Plex had attempted to work with Hetzner to identify and remove the ToS offenders and were rebuffed. Is that so far-fetched?
I understand that this is affecting a number of non-ToS violators. And that is indeed very unfortunate. What I donāt understand are the conspiracy theories and the assumption of ill-intent, or even stupidity/laziness/incompetence on Plexās part.
Again, they have a very real problem to solve here. It does none of us any good when there are individuals out there trying to implement their own *flix-type service using Plex as their backend. Even if they were only a personal media server platform (trying to be legitimate) this would still be a problem theyād need to solve.
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You got a good Point there i literally dont thought of.
But i think there could be other ways to conquer the problem itself because it will only be a short term solution and other hosting Provider will be blocked in the long run too.
Maybe i am in a wrong mind for this but i highly doubt that the users that are going against the ToS wont find another Hoster/Solution to this blocks.
DonĀ“t get me wrong but this is just another thing Plex changes what made my experience even more bitter with them.
Most of the people that state they will switch wont do it thats also something thats absolutly true
but i think plex should have been more open with the block and not just notice us a few weeks before.
Maybe they could have implement a metric system where you need to opt-in to use PMS on a dedicated server so they can messure your traffic created without capturing any sensitiv data.
Just the pure number of clients and the total traffic they use to find potential violation against their ToS.
At best sharing/streaming with friends and family is a legal gray area, at worst itās just as illegal as piratingā¦
Plex wants to crackdown on piracy? Letās not kid ourselves: their entire business model up until now was dependent on piracy. Yes, looking at you, holier-than-thou homelab advocates. You really want to cut out the piracy? Try blocking Xfinity IPsā¦
So they want to crack down on piracy. The TOS say you can only share with members of your āimmediate family.ā It would be trivially easy for them to limit sharing to 4 people per instance. Yes the industrial pirates could run multiple instances but just that one change would increase their costs significantly.
Instead, they choose an ineffectual solution, one that the industrial pirates will shrug off as quickly as you can say āVPNā and the knowledgeable ordinary users who donāt want to give up their Hetzner servers will be doing the same. Meanwhile, others will jump to Jellyfin or Emby and what will have been achieved? Nothing. Plex will still be used by millions of pirates, small and large.
And any large media conglomerate will know this. So why would this fig leaf solution convince them that Plex is taking the problem seriously?
P.S. They are in violation of GDPR. Thereās very little doubt about it.
Why? Thereās no additional cost involved with running multiple Plex servers. The resource implications are minimal and would likely add only a small overhead as compared to running one server with multiple users. And anyway, from earlier discussions here and other plex ācommunitiesā it would appear that multiple server instances is already an approach used by the offenders in question.
It doesnāt have to. These things have always been about appearances. The large media conglomerates know they arenāt going to stop piracy, but they do want organisations they do business with to at least pay lip service to preventing it.
Howās that going with the Data Protection people? They told you that youāll need to take it up with Plex first yet?
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To see, however unlikely, if itās possible to force Plex to do a source release.
Why though?
Indeed. From the GPLv2 FAQ:
By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms
normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the
modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are
intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to
consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.
The obvious example here is that FFMPEG (Plex Transcoder) is a separate program. The main program (Plex Media Server) launches it via with command-line arguments to dictate its actions and communicates with it via sockets (via localhost networking). And though they (FSF) gave themselves a potential out (semantically intimate communication), that doesnāt seem to apply here as the transcoder is given a task and its output is consumed.
Iāve not examined every licensed program Plex utilizes to see how it fits into the open source umbrella but, as mentioned previously, most are licensed under BSD-like licenses (MIT, Apache, etcā¦) or LGPL. Only two are GPLv2.
However, Iām, admittedly, not a lawyer. Perhaps thereās one out there who can pound the table hard enough to convince a judge that Plex has violated the rights of others under the GPL.
Iād suggest having a purity of intent before pursuing any such legal action; āPlex inconvenienced me and made me mad and now I want to punish themā is not that.
As an aside, perhaps Iām being a bit naive here. Iāve seen a couple of legal arguments made in this thread; one pertaining to the GDPR (repeatedly) and another related to GPL licensing. The way they were positioned, it seems that both were intended to be wielded like a club, bludgeoning someone (Plex in this case) into submission.
Iāve always considered these tools as being intended to be used more like a shield, to protect oneself when oneās rightās had been violated.
Itās a small but, I feel, significant difference. If you felt your legal rights were being violated under either condition, then that was certainly the case before Plexās recent actions. Why werenāt these concerns raised as loudly before Plex made you angry? Certainly these violations, if indeed they are violations, were as severe beforehand as they are now.
Hence my concern regarding purity of intent. Doing a thing for the wrong reason is just as harmful doing the wrong thing.
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Thatās half the content on this forum lately.
Assuming Plex will be verifying any remote access url/ip assigned to a server against the hetzner asn like youāre saying in addition to blocking communication to *.plex.tv this too can be easily bypassed.
Using the Custom server access URL feature inside Plex I can specify the host/ip that Plex uses to connect up. By setting this up using a 302 or 301 redirect we can spoof the actual destination.
For example I can set the custom URL to https://plexban.pointless.com:32400
Using your theory Plex will then resolve plexban.pointless.com to an IP and check it against the hetzner asn and if matched - DENY url publish. But wait, thereās more.
The thing about plexban.pointless.com is it DOES NOT resolve to a hetzner asn. It actually resolves to ANYTHING ELSE and then performs a 302 or 301 redirect to another domain that has the actual server host/IP hosted on the hetzner asn.
WORKED AROUND AND BYPASSED.
āeasilyā
server {
server_name PLEXBAN.mydomain.com;
return 301 https://hetznerip$request_uri$is_args$args;
@berndmr This works. Why delete your comments? I just tested it.
Edit: working half way. Needs some tweaking for the different ways the client talks to the server but is doable. nginx needs to reconstruct the URL properly and thatās dependent on what the client is asking the server for.
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If you proxy the entire connection or even buy another Ip it would be possible to bypass it too.
There are many ways to bypass it
Your solution will not bring anything to the deadline, because the Plex server as software communicates with the main server of Plex at startup and in general and transmits an IP address and on this they will look or block if the ASN is e.g. Hetzner.
Either you host locally or put a proxy/VPN in front of the outgoing connection from your Plex Media Server.
I am fortunately not affected but find the contribution here very interesting and am curious which absurd measures will follow. It is just a cat and mouse game.
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Since Iām the one who has been making the GDPR case, this is clearly directed at me. My response: what makes you think I havenāt raised the concerns as loudly before?
Hereās a contribution (one of several) from me in a thread from January 2020: Why is Plex "sharing my activities" with Facebook? - #31 by banjopotato
Are you at all concerned with the GDPR implications of this? Iām a citizen and resident of the European Union and youāve effectively transmitted personally-identifying information of mine to a third party without my explicit consent. I never opted in to your sharing of this information and you never gave me an opportunity to opt out. Seems to me youāve handled this in a way that puts you in violation of the regulation. This is a data breach for which the penalties (per case) are prohibitive. As in: enough to bankrupt your company. See this for example. I would sincerely hate to see that happen to Plex, because I like your product. But, seriously, how could you have let this happen?
There are threads dating from 2018 in which others have pointed out Plexās flouting of GDPR.
So, do I pass your purity test? Am I authorised to make the case?
