this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Plex crossed a line with "Your week in review" emails today. (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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As you may have seen Plex decided it was OK today to send an email showing me what my friends have been watching. To be clear, this is Plex telling other people what I've been watching from my server, with my files, and this is not OK.

https://imgur.com/a/DYR4wlh

We all knew it was a matter of time before Plex started collecting data on our libraries and sharing it with advertisers. What happened to their "we don't know, and don't want to know, what is on your server"?. This, for me, is proof that those fears were absolutely founded in reality. On what planet would I ever want this information to be shared with friends on family on an OPT OUT basis?

It's totally unacceptable to collect this data in the first place. It's totally unacceptable to share this information with uniquely identifiable information. And it's totally unacceptable to do this without explicitly asking me if it's OK.

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about this as a server admin, because technically these are Plex users and their marketing email preferences are controlled on the user side in the Plex website preferences. Not on your server.

This is an absolutely egregious overreach.

Thank goodness there are alternatives available in the form of Jellyfin and Emby. I left my Plex server up after the Jellyfin January challenge we did on the Self-Hosted podcast but because of this I feel that I have no choice but to take it down for good.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Amazon stick is the cheapest (easy) way to turn any TV into a Jellyfin TV.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I use one myself. He's already using all the HDMI ports on his AV receiver though, so there's no room for any extra devices.

I know modern TVs can send the audio from the TV to the receiver, so in theory he could plug the stick into the TV instead, but his one seems to only be able to send certain formats that way, and you can't see the receiver's overlay on the TV when using it that way, so it's impossible to adjust anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Personally, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with my Fire Stick. It's kind of sluggish, and very locked-down. You used to be able to sideload a custom home launcher, but Amazon is cracking down on that. Their launcher is filled with bloat and ads. Recently I've noticed mine auto-playing Amazon Prime video trailers on boot which makes me want to throw it out the window.

I have JF installed on my Samsung (Tizen) TV and it works great. And the TV will auto-launch back into JF on boot... something I wish Fire Stick allowed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Amazon Fire days being based on Android appear to be numbered. Doesn't mean JF or any other client can't have a React-based client for whatever Vega becomes if/when launched, but I'd expect it to take some time. The prior effort for a React-based client seemed to have died a number of years ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Strange, I haven't experienced that, but I'm also connected to Amazon Canada, so maybe it's different.

Even side loaded Steam Link to stream games and it works pretty well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

How has been your experience with higher bitrate/quality stream directplay?

On my 4-5 year old Samsung TV I notice sluggish playback with 4K and high bitrate files with the Tizen Jellyfin app.

With plex the same files were working fine.

On my Desktop (using MPV) all files playback fine.

Now I think about buying something like a FireTV stick or Xiaomi TV Box...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I've been tossing the idea around to set up a cheap mini NUC-like box, like a Beelink or something similar. About the same prices as an Apple TV or higher end Roku, and you can either use Windows, Linux, or even Android on it. Just needs a convenient remote to navigate it without needing to hook up a mouse and keyboard, or gamepad, and it would be a great little set top box.

Also I'm kind of surprised there aren't more Linux distros for this already. We've got gaming console-like dedicated distros in Batocera, Lakka, RetroPi, Recall Box, etc. even stuff like SteamOS, or customized clones like Bazzite, Holo and Chimera. Where's the TV focused OS? The closest I see are typically just running Kodi on boot, which is ok I guess, but I want something more like an all-around HTPC where Kodi is just an application I launch when I want to watch something, rather than the sole UI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I’m also not a fan of Amazon’s streaming devices. I grabbed a 4k fire cube for $50 last year during one of their sales. This thing already lags like crazy and recently started playing an ad when you first turn it on. Annoying.

My 2017 NVidia Shield still rocks.