Plex To Shut Down Its Cloud Service (variety.com) 42
Plex has informed users that it will be shutting down cloud-based media server Plex Cloud at the end of November. First launched in 2016, Plex Cloud offered users a way to easily access extra storage. Initially, users had to subscribe to Amazon Drive, which cost $59.99 a year for unlimited storage at the time and get a Plex Pass in order to use Plex Cloud. Later on, Plex added support for Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage. From a report, which looks at the rationale behind the move: "We've made the difficult decision to shut down the Plex Cloud service on November 30th, 2018," the company said in an email. "We've been actively working on ways to address various issues while keeping costs under control. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven't found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost." Plex has traditionally relied on users operating their own media server to stream videos, music and more to mobile and TV-connected devices. Plex users often run their server hardware on dedicated computers or network-attached storage drives, but the reliance on such hardware has limited the appeal of the software to more casual users. [...] Behind the scenes, Plex was augmenting these storage solutions with its own cloud servers, capable of transcoding media on the fly to stream to a wide variety of devices. However, the company ran into some technical issues, which prompted it to first disable support for Amazon's cloud storage and then in February halt the creation of new cloud servers.
Plex is a pirates tool (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to sh%t on plex, but the bulk of people who use plex have at least some if not most of their library built up of pirated movies and tv content... These folks are not exactly keen to put that in the cloud...
Re:Plex is a pirates tool (Score:4, Interesting)
More correctly, those of us who use Plex desire to control our own assets. Putting out content on the cloud takes that control away because Amazon or whoever can easily wipe out those assets or just simply block us from accessing them. Plus, we would have to pay an ISP to access those assets. Keeping them local means we don't even have to pay anyone extra money to use our own assets.
Re: (Score:2)
No, plex is not just a pirate tool, I use it to host videos from conferences and educational material.
Re: Translation (Score:3, Insightful)
Any pirate that uses plex is an idiot..just use a file server and smb or nfs shares over a network. Plex is trash.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe you never leave your basement, but the rest of us do. What happens when you want to watch something outside your network? I don't use Plex much at home but it's great when I'm travelling to be able to effortlessly stream from my home computer.
Plex does realtime transcoding to adjust the quality based on available bandwidth. How's your brilliant fucking file server solution going to help with that?
Not to mention all the features you get like automatic metadata/poster fetching, sorting & categori
Re: Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, I have a remote server using Plex.
I set it up with sonarr, radarr, headphones and usenet. I also have tautulli, cockpit, munin, owncloud, and resilio sync too.
I have a reverse proxy using Let's Encryt to manage everything in the front end.
Work's really well as a remote server using CentOS7 headless.
I have everything encrypted locally and on the network side. All the services are heavily firewalled and I only allow access to plex ports open to the world.
It's rock solid, can share my content privately and have access to it wherever I have a network connection.
Anyone trashing plex is seriously smoking crack and has no IT imagination on a good and functional remote (or local) deployment.
Re: (Score:2)
In particular, do you actualy trust Plex with open ports? Or do you have them somewhat firewalled? I'm using the Plex redirection relay service -- I don't have / care about Full 8K Video; having limited resolution is worth it to me to NOT have a port open. Besides my upload bandwidth speed
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
It's one thing to have everything local configured exactly how you like it on devices you directly control and own. Now (literally) take it outside of your basement (oops, guess I'm a troll now too!) and run it on random devices owned by other people you can't control with random connect
Re: (Score:2)
Heh, I was being a LITTLE troll-y. The post was so comically abrasive, myopic and self-centred I couldn't help myself.
But you know what's WAY MORE trollish? Calling people that use Plex idiots.
Re: Translation (Score:2)
Plex does realtime transcoding to adjust the quality based on available bandwidth. How's your brilliant fucking file server solution going to help with that?
Yippee. I rsync the stuff I'm currently interested in onto a couple 5tb drives and bring them with me. No worrying about transcoding or having a connection at all. I can even watch my media at 40,000 feet over the Atlantic ocean. If I get to the other end and find that the 10+ TBs of shit I brought with me really isn't enough, I can SSH into my home system, transcode a media file with a single command to ffmpeg, and copy it over. Don't even have to wait for it to finish; VLC will play if just fine whil
Re: Translation (Score:2)
Side note - WTF are you talking about Plex constantly hassling you to sign up for an account? Never had an issue with that, other than their emails that you subscribed to
The android app would occasionally bug me to "sign in", and it's designed so the "skip" option is hard to find (same thing that bugs me with Windows 10 accounts). The web interface to the server would do the same thing, but at least it was slightly easier to figure out how to get around it. However the worst part was that for a while (due, I imagine, to some random bug) I couldn't access the administrative interface at all; it would just redirect me to the sign-in page. Since I had no intention of creati
Re: (Score:2)
And that's great, and I carry media with me too. Though as time goes by, I worry more about TSA demanding access to look through all my shit.
If I'm out of town and want to download and watch something new, I can just RDP to home, download it to my Plex folder, and stream away. I was in a long distance relationship recently, and we used Plex to be able to watch stuff together easily. You think it would be better to rsync shit to my girlfriend's computer? Give me a break. I download it once and we can both
Re: Translation (Score:2)
You only strengthen my point about ease-of-use. You can do that. I can do that. Most people can't.
I'm fully aware of that, which is why I never argued against your ease-of-use argument. For me my setup is more flexible and almost as easy to use. For the average user it may as well be some obscure voodoo ritual.
I don't recommend my setup to the average user just like I don't recommend that my mother try maintaining her own Linux based media server with a 10 disk ZFS array. For her, I just buy a media box with a Netflix app. For myself I can do better.
Re: (Score:2)
Any pirate that uses plex is an idiot..just use a file server and smb or nfs shares over a network. Plex is trash.
I have video stored on the computer in my office. I have an Amazon Firestick attached to my TV in the den. Is your solution to abandon Plex and invest in another PC for the den? Plex does a fine job, although I found it flaky on my Chromecast.
"Technical Issues" (Score:5, Insightful)
Were these 'technical issues' due to lawyers from media companies perhaps?
Very likely. (Score:1)
I have a lifetime subscription. I did not ever put anything in the cloud. I heard about it by word of mouth from people who put their entire media collections, mostly pirated, in to the cloud storage so they could share their library with friends and also for the stated ales reason of streaming their own stuff from cloud storage to anything anywhere. I'm guessing the first part is where they ran in to problems.
With clouds it rains (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah put your stuff in the cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
and watch the cloud go *poof*
Re: (Score:1)
You clearly don't know how useful a Plex link would be after Plex went *poof*
Re: (Score:3)
Plex Media Server as a platform for sorting and delivering video content is really goddamned good. Almost magic. There are a handful of TV shows where there are arguments about how the episodes should be ordered (Doctor Who is the biggest example) but for the most part, if you sort your content between TV and Movies, it'll figure everything out.
Plex is pretty bad at handling music, but that's definitely an afterthought compared to video content. It can also work with a OTA TV tuner and has limited support f
This never made sense to me anyway (Score:5, Informative)
They wanted us to waste bandwidth and cloud storage to copy the files we already have somewhere locally to the cloud just so we could download them back again to play. Once again, wasting bandwidth caps that we might have.
Setting up the Plex server software on an old computer, laptop, etc takes 10 minutes and you don't waste any bandwidth or cloud storage. Using their cloud service on the other hand is a lot harder to setup and manage because you had to setup the cloud account, give them access to it, send up your files, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yes banwith caps, I’m not shore but it seems to me rhat usage caps on anuthing but mobile bradband is prty much a US only thing, I might be wrong so pleace correct me if I am. The cloud thing from plex was probably meant to combat the ofte low upload speeds of home broadband (DSL if you live more than a few hundred eters from the CO or are on cable, hell even some fiber isps). But I suspect that oeople thst sourced ther media from questionable sources did not want to upload it incase RIAA etc raded
Re: (Score:2)
What's with all the weird stuff? (Score:1)
This reads like a total comedy. Proprietary file-serving service, another proprietary file-serving service, etc. It's 2018. Where's the NFS or SFTP or (*sigh*) even SMB/CIFS? No wonder I never bothered with Plex!
Played with Plex some... (Score:3)
and opted not to join up for the paid plan. As far as I could tell, the best feature was the channels which are free. Some of the networks, CBS for example, put up full run episodes without any commercials. So you could watch, say, Hawaii 5-0 a few days after it aired commercial free in 1080.
But honestly I don't use Plex much these days. Lots of other ways to get content with a lot less fuss.
Re: (Score:2)
The bit you are missing is the ability to connect to that marvelous collection outside your home. Are you seriously going to set up a VPN so you can attempt to direct stream over NFS or CIFS? No. A Plex Media Server (or you can do it with Emby) gives you and other people you choose to invite access to your media.
I have Plex set up for my family to access outside my home. If I want to watch something, I'll do it over a Kodi front-end. I don't pay any attention to Plex unless I happen to be on a work trip or
At least the data is there (Score:3)
Their model usually works, but they overextended at this cloud thing.
First they got the Amazon to shut down the unlimited offering. Basically what Plex enables with "cloud" is that serving your own content, on 3rd party cloud providers, including Amazon, Dropbox etc. However when people uploaded their entire libraries to Amazon "unlimited" layer, all of a sudden Amazon decided to no longer provide such a storage.
Then Plex seem to have struggled just to keep the indexing / serving infrastructure for this service. These costs real CPU cycles, and they add up. Even if you pay, it would not be enough. So they are shutting down the "frontend".
At least you can still serve your own content on your own hardware (or vps). However I don't think you can serve thru Dropbox / etc directly anymore.