and b. this data is easy to rebuild over time.

You say that, but some shows and movies are getting very hard to find these days. I lost one show to an external HDD that died, and I have never been able to find it again :(. That’s part of the reason I recently went to a DAS in my setup instead of a NAS - backblaze backs the entire 40TB DAS up for ~$90 a year!

You got them all in uncompressed 8K or something!? How on earth does it take up that much space?

Movies: 7796

TV Series: 1443 (4128 seasons, 49344 episodes)

Music (tracks): 37909

All up its pushing 45TB currently. All legal backups, obviously.

I’m trying to get all 1080p 10bit 5.1 x265 for tv and movies, but am not converting 264 -> 265 myself as it would take forever and is lossy. Sonarr and radarr will take care of it eventually anyway with the way I’ve set up my profiles.

Subtitles are usually SRTs grabbed by Bazarr, stored in a subtitles folder inside each movie folder.

Folder structure is just the standard folder per movie, and folder per tv series with sub folders per season.

Music is 320kbps mp3 where possible, and for the last year or 2 I’ve been trying to get FLAC and then convert to mp3 (automatically) and archive off the FLAC for safe keeping.

Whenever the 265 successor comes out I’ll look at upgrading to 4K if the space requirements are not crazy. With the price of storage and large bay NAS/DAS devices there’s just no way I could do 4K as it stands.

That’s completely different. Every internet connected service has risks, but having known vulnerabilities that you just refuse to fix is different to someone figuring out a complex exploit.

The irony of not wanting to use Plex and saying to use Tailscale to let you use jellyfin is just too good.

Get Bazarr so you never have to worry about subtitle searching again.

https://www.bazarr.media/

Yeah this temperature is nothing. Regularly gets over 40 degrees Celsius where I am, and all of my home servers have run 24/7 through it without issue, not in air conditioning.

30.8 to 31.5……that’s nothing at all. What am I missing here?

Get a Meross Garage Door Opener/closer: https://shop.meross.com/products/smart-wifi-garage-door-opener

Fantastic product, works in homeassistant.

Are you saying that you’re on your home network with your Plex server and it won’t let you play your media without paying? That’s not true if so. You must be outside the network.

It’s like the difference between using Plex and a file browser to find a movie/show to watch.

Set up Overseerr.

This is a complete false equivalence and I feel that you know that. The idea of a console is to expand it by buying new games. That’s not unexpected.

It’s not though. The idea of self hosting isn’t to not have any software costs associated with it. Domain names aren’t free. VPNs (that you use to aquire content) aren’t free. Cloud backups aren’t free. Would you prefer everything was free? Absolutely. Do you sometimes have to pay to get the best software for the job? Absolutely, and Plex is that software.

I am a software developer.

Same here! That makes your argument even crazier to me! Someone demanding that your software should be free and should never be changed to be paid even if it means the company goes under is bananas.

The argument is that this is an exceptionally poor business model and as a developer I’m disgusted that people are defending it.

The business model of having the people that use their main product that requires the most development and time and resources, Plex Server, pay either a cheap one off fee (that regularly goes on sale for half price) or a monthly subscription fee in order to use it, is “exceptionally poor”? How so? Is it just that it was free? This business model has been around for eternity. Get people in the door and hooked by offering it for free, then start charging for it. It’s one of the actual best business models around, not “exceptionally poor” lol. You’re looking at it from the “I want it to be free forever” point of view, not the “We need it to be a viable business with revenue to be able to sustain it” point of view.

until there’s no such thing as free software anymore.

That will never happen, because people will always be making free software to put out there for people to try and to use - and many of them will then transition to PAID because it’s not sustainable otherwise. For software to thrive you often have to have full time developers working on it, and full time developers need to be paid.

At the end of the day you’re paying twice to avoid buying IP. Just fucking buy the IP if you’re going to be stupid. Movies are like $12. At $250 you’re paying $2.10/mo in addition to your hosting costs.

Just go buy 20 movies for the same price. It’s so dumb.

I paid ~$100 ~10 years ago for Plex Pass. It paid for itself instantly as I was simply supporting the developers of the software. As a software developer I have no problem doing that. I wasn’t forced to buy it, but I did.

I’m not quite sure where you got this $250 figure from though? What is that, the monthly remote pass x 12? Also most people running a plex server get far more than 20 movies a year lol. Pretty sure I got 20 movies last night.

I paid $100 to play Forza Horizon on my own device too - should that have been free?

This is a profoundly absurd statement.

That no other solution exists that is as easy and secure as Plex? That’s not just absurd, but profoundly absurd? What other solution is there that is?

Your entire argument seems to be that software should be free if it’s on your own device, which is a profoundly absurd statement. The only paid software should be on hardware you don’t own?

Jellyfin isn’t yet. It will if they ever want to actually compete and make a living from it.

It’d fit the privilege of using someone else’s software.

Adding extra tiers that only the people who already bought a Plex pass would buy? If you run a Plex server and haven’t got a Plex pass by now, you were never going to unless they did what they’re doing now, as it’s basically feature complete.

You don’t really seem to understand that businesses need revenue and profit to survive, publicly traded or private. You’d rather see Plex die than have their most hardcore users have to pay a tiny fee?

I really don’t give a shit if a corporation needs more revenue to satisfy their infinite growthTM.

Oh so they don’t deserve to be paid for their work, the only reason they’d be after money is for “infinite growthTM”?

What’s not fine is taking something away people used to get for free

I agree that’s never good, but what’s the alternative? Go out of business? Insert ads into your streaming of local content? Another way rip look at it is that they’ve been giving away their product for free due the last 10+ years that they should have been charging for.

I mention JellyFin because at some stage it will become a business and they’ll start charging too, or it will get left behind because it’s free. People can fork all they want, but businesses that provide services can’t do so for free for eternity.

Is there even anyone that runs a plex server who doesn’t have a lifetime plex pass these days? I’ve had one for 10+ years at this stage. I bought it to support the devs as they made this amazing software that I’ve used for probably hundreds of thousands of hours of streaming from my server. I paid like $100. I pay less than that much in 1 month to my ISP.

IMO it’s a fair change, because the product has always been worthy of being a paid product.

People are free to go elsewhere, but they’ll quickly realize that the one off plex pass price is cheap for what you get.

Nah. How would you get Uncle Bob to use tailscale on his PS5 to watch Jellyfin, for example?

“Shitty move by a corporation”? You mean requiring the person that’s using their flagship all encompassing flagship software product to pay a one off fee? A one off fee that seemingly most people who host a Plex server already bought?

Software costs money to make and maintain. You’re not entitled to it for free. Plex’s software is legitimately great and is the only software on the market that does what it does and makes it as easy as it is.

and evidently has no costs associated to the corp

As has been pointed out many times in here, this is wrong. Plex have hardware that is used when many, probably most, people stream remotely. Also developers cost money to employ. Developers make the software that is regularly updated. They deserve to be paid, don’t they?

It is pretty damn obvious how this will continue.

So you agree the same thing will happen to JellyFin then, right? So why even bother getting Jellyfin set up now when it will inevitably happen there too?