I use Hetzner as a seedbox and then have PLEX as my media server ran on the same hardware. It’s worked perfectly fine for years. But recently PLEX says they will be blocking Hetzner hosting in the next few weeks. I’ve been considering moving to Jellyfin for a while, but I’m worried they will do the same thing in future.
Does anyone know if that’s a real possibility?
Also, if I setup a VPN and just download stuff I torrent from my seedbox to a local PLEX server, would I be in any more risk of legal issues then I am now?
Am I looking at this completely wrong, and I should do something completely different?
To clarify what I am thinking of doing:
Keep my Hetzner as my seedbox and continue to download using my IPTorrents account. Setup a Local Plex or Jellyfin server and download from my seedbox to that local server that will be ran behind a VPN.
Plex is so bizarre. I consider myself a tech-savvy person, but I can’t wrap my head around the concept of “I host Example App on my servers. I host, maintain, and pay for the instance of Example App and servers myself. I also pay for a license for Example App. But Example Company controls my instance.” It’s so foreign to everything you can host yourself. It’s such an unfair commercial practice that I can’t for the life of me explain how such a model can survive. Self-hosting is about regaining control in my books. Yet Plex over here thinks they can not only shove down the maintenance burden and costs of everything down my throat, but also control access to my data. The solution to Plex’s retarded ToS violation situation is for Plex to say shit happens, how about we stop controlling everything you do with Plex to such an excessive degree that the media mafia can accuse us of empowering piracy instead of… the person who hosts pirated media on their server? Plex’s biggest business liability is Plex’s own business practices.
I thought the phone home was to make it easy to have different devices talk to each other. It’s similar for a lot of IoT products. If properly set up, they don’t need to phone home and can find each other with the setting ayku input. However, many users are less technical and automating this through a central service makes it easier. Most companies also use this to scoop up personal info too, unfortunately.
they’re trying to double as a streaming platform (like roku channel, tubi, etc) for mass-market media. that creates a conflict between the big studios licensing that content to them and the platform’s common historical use case. they may have to choose ‘one or the other’, and i would not be surprised if further ‘actions’ are taken by plex to curb (or outright remove support for) media ‘sharing’.
Or neither option: Launch a streaming platform. No, don’t morph smth everyone loves into a streaming platform. Plex’s marketing for their streaming vision is so piss poor that the only people who know about it use Plex for a use case that clashes with this new vision.