From bouncing around my favorite corners of the Internet, I get the impression that large numbers of people have “a guy” (of any gender), akin to a weed dealer in furtiveness and legality, who is hooking them up with an underground, probably Plex-based (but increasingly moving to Jellyfin), streaming service. I get the impression that there are hundreds to thousands of these little “Plex server” operations, each serving a couple dozen to a hundred or so users out of the goodness/vileness of each “guy”'s heart and the hobby budget of that “guy”'s homelab. This isn’t all Plex gets used for or even necessarily the main use case, but I think they’re out there.

Obviously no “guy” will admit to doing this, but my “Plex Server Guy Theory” neatly explains this post announcing that general discussions of piracy are allowed in the Lemmy.ml Plex community and this post by someone apparently serving enough new Plex user volume that a webhook would be convenient to have. I’ve also seen people discussing Plex refer to “my users”, as if they have a user base of friends and trusted or semi-trustred acquaintances rather than just a household or family.

I personally neither have nor am a “Plex Server Guy”, nor do I know anyone who has admitted to me that they do have or are one, so I can’t be sure they really exist. But I have suspicions.

Are “Plex Server Guys” as I imagine them real and common and I am just too square to have ever been invited to do crimes with everyone else? Are they rare in real life but enriched in the dubious/cool corners of the Internet? Does it depend on your country? What’s the deal?

  • deranger@sh.itjust.works
    372·
    2 months ago

    I’m a Plex server guy for friends and family, I have about a dozen users and maybe 3-4 at a time at the peaks. I charge nothing, it’s just a hobby. We’re out there.

    I’d switch to Jellyfin but my users need transcoding and Plexamp is my favorite audio player since Winamp.

    • kandykarter@lemmy.ca
      19·
      2 months ago

      I’m a Jellyfin Server Guy, and same deal. Around a dozen friends & fam, no charge.

      I’m not sure why needing transcoding would keep you off Jellyfin though, Jellyfin transcodes just fine.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      I’m that guy as well, but can’t get family to use it. So when they complain they can’t stream something, I just ignore them. I do it for myself, they just get it because. But I’m not going to keep offering, fuck it. Go spend your money on shitty streaming services. I’ve got 7000 movies now and almost 300 series.

      • deranger@sh.itjust.works
        10·
        2 months ago

        I’m specifically doing this to get family and friends to cancel their streaming subscriptions. Not to save them money, to hurt the corporations more than I can do just myself.

    • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      Does Jellyfin not do transcoding? I’ve been using it with transcoding for almost two years, so if it doesn’t, man that’s gonna be quite the shock.

      • deranger@sh.itjust.works
        61·
        2 months ago

        I dunno, maybe it didn’t when I was first setting up my server a few years back. It doesn’t have Plexamp though and that’s a deal breaker.

    • AZX3RIC@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      I’ve been wondering about this, how does hiding the activity from your ISP, as well as the ISP of the person streaming from your server, work?

      I have friends I’d like to share my library with but am always nervous about the risk.

      • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        With P2P file sharing, your client is sharing the files with random people on the internet and you’re identified by your IP address (or a VPN IP address / seedbox IP address / etc). MPAA hires companies to check for popular content and log the IP address, time, and content shared, and then sends that to the ISP. The risk and issue is sharing content with anyone randomly, since that is how your ISP is informed of the activity.

        With media servers, unless you’re somehow sharing publicly, it’s safe to assume your members aren’t going to report you to your ISP. I guess in theory the ISP could see high upload bandwidth and investigate, but more likely than not, if there are limits, automated systems will just throttle the bandwidth, and no deep packet inspection or other forensics is performed.