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  • Plex feature now shares your porn history with friends

    From Retrograde@21:1/5 to All on Tue Nov 28 01:21:25 2023
    https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/11/27/1836216/plex-users-fear-new-feature-will-leak-porn-habits-to-their-friends-and-family

    Many Plex users were alarmed when they got a "week in review" email last
    week that showed them what they and their friends had watched on the
    popular media server software. From a report:

    Some users are saying that their friends' softcore porn habits are being revealed to them with the feature, while others are horrified by the potentially invasive nature feature more broadly. Plex is a hybrid
    streaming service/self-hosted media server. In addition to offering
    content that Plex itself has licensed, the service allows users to
    essentially roll their own streaming service by making locally
    downloaded files available to stream over the internet to devices the
    server admin owns. You can also "friend" people on Plex and give them
    access to your own server.

    A new feature, called "Discover Together," expands social aspects of
    Plex and introduces an "Activity" tab: "See what your friends have
    watched, rated, added to their Watchlist, or shared with you," Plex
    notes. It also shares this activity in a "week in review" email that it
    sent to Plex users and people who have access to their servers.

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  • From rdh@21:1/5 to Retrograde on Tue Nov 28 09:22:31 2023
    On 11/27/23 19:21, Retrograde wrote:
    Many Plex users were alarmed when they got a "week in review" email last
    week that showed them what they and their friends had watched on the
    popular media server software. <snip>

    Plex ``features'' are why my Plex server is not allowed to communicate
    to the Internet. I download on a seedbox then rsync to the Plex server.

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  • From Eli the Bearded@21:1/5 to rdh@tilde.institute on Wed Dec 6 23:58:56 2023
    In misc.news.internet.discuss, rdh <rdh@tilde.institute> wrote:
    On 11/27/23 19:21, Retrograde wrote:
    Many Plex users were alarmed when they got a "week in review" email last
    week that showed them what they and their friends had watched on the
    popular media server software. <snip>
    Plex ``features'' are why my Plex server is not allowed to communicate
    to the Internet. I download on a seedbox then rsync to the Plex server.

    This news reached me just as I was planning to add Plex to my life. In my
    case, I want the media server to be accessible outside my house,
    otherwise I'd just keep doing what I do now.

    My reading of the story is this Plex "feature" doesn't rely on the
    servers being network accessible, it relies on who you have linked
    accounts with, possibly because you want to view things on _some one
    else's_ server. Then maybe you get a message about their viewing habits
    and they get one about yours.

    Anyway, I've purchased parts (a refurb 7x7x1 inch "desktop" machine and
    some storage media) to build my media server and I plan on using
    Jellyfin, not Plex.

    Elijah
    ------
    thumbdrives and scp have worked for a long time

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  • From Retrograde@21:1/5 to Eli the Bearded on Thu Dec 7 01:57:34 2023
    On 2023-12-06, Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
    Anyway, I've purchased parts (a refurb 7x7x1 inch "desktop" machine and
    some storage media) to build my media server and I plan on using
    Jellyfin, not Plex.

    Jellyfin seems to be the right solution these days. It spun off of Plex anyway. I was an earlier user of Plex but each revision made it less
    useful to me. The final straw was having to dig for my own media,
    through reams of "suggested content" and subscriptions etc.

    My current solution is mplayer or VLC and watching stuff directly off my
    NAS.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Eli the Bearded@21:1/5 to fungus@amongus.com.invalid on Fri Dec 8 00:42:26 2023
    In misc.news.internet.discuss, Retrograde <fungus@amongus.com.invalid> wrote:
    Jellyfin seems to be the right solution these days. It spun off of Plex anyway. I was an earlier user of Plex but each revision made it less
    useful to me. The final straw was having to dig for my own media,
    through reams of "suggested content" and subscriptions etc.

    Enshitification.

    My current solution is mplayer or VLC and watching stuff directly off my
    NAS.

    As of today, there are three ways I watch video files.

    One: locally on my laptop[*].
    Two: copied[*] to a thumbdrive and pluged into the non-networked TV.
    Three: copied[*] to an Android device + VLC.

    [*] Files sometimes from local disk, sometimes from external disk.

    I'm hoping Jellyfin will allow me to watch things while outside my house without remembering to pre-copy files. I have fiber to house, so
    bandwidth is not a concern.

    Elijah
    ------
    server just arrived about an hour ago

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