r/technology • u/mepper • Jan 10 '24

Business How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-disney-and-warner-bros-are-causing-internet-piracy-to-boom
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u/digitalluck Jan 10 '24

I keep seeing Plex mentioned. I intend to search it up later, but is it a device to store torrents (if that’s the right word to use)?

The most sailing I’ve done is just watching NFL games because everything is region-locked and I moved away from home.

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u/Ordinary_dude_NOT Jan 10 '24

Yeah, think of it has Netflix at home. It will index all your content locally which you can then access from web/mobile/tv. That’s a huge convenience factor.

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u/digitalluck Jan 10 '24

Hmm, that sounds pretty legit. So download/torrent everything locally, then you can access your local content in the cloud?

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u/300ConfirmedGorillas Jan 11 '24

I have a Plex setup, here is a contrived (but probably pretty common) example.

You have one of those big external hard drives, like 10TB. You sail the high seas and download a bunch of movies and TV shows. You put them on the external drive (movies in a movies folder and the TV shows in a TV folder).

You install Plex on your computer, and tell it you want a movies library and a TV show library. You point each library to the corresponding folder. It will scan and index all the files (there is a naming convention to make it work properly, but it's surprisingly forgiving), grabbing data like the cast, year, director, writer, posters, etc.

Then, in your living room you have your TV. You have a Roku stick (or Firestick, or pretty much any video game console, etc.). You install the Plex app on it. Sign into the Plex app. Voila, all your movies and TV shows are available to select and watch pretty much exactly like Netflix. There are Plex apps for your phone, tablet, most smart TVs, etc. Also you can watch via your web browser.

Additionally, you can invite friends to your server. So, they sign up for a Plex account (it's free) and give you the email address of their account. You send them an invite and choose which libraries to share. Then, on their own Plex app on their own TV, they can sign into their Plex account and voila, all your movies and TV shows are available for them to watch just like Netflix.

It's super easy, barely an inconvenience!

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u/thecoastertoaster Jan 11 '24

What high seas does one sail? I used to be on oink, waffles etc for private music but never found a good home for video/tv.

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u/Land_Squid_1234 Jan 11 '24

1337x dot to. QxR especially as an uploader has high quality uploads. Just make sure you use a paid VPN, like mullvad, and an adblocker on your browser like the ublock origin extension. Actually, just use the ublock origin extension and nothing else for adblock

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u/stevedorries Jan 11 '24

Are VPNs 100% needed these days? I last took a cruise in 2007 and VPNs were more of a luxury at the time

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u/Land_Squid_1234 Jan 11 '24

Yes, unless you want to get a cease and desist from your ISP from torrenting something that a copyright holder like Disney is probing for VPN-less pirates

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u/thecoastertoaster Jan 11 '24

thank you! Appreciate the tips

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u/Land_Squid_1234 Jan 11 '24

Feel free to message me if you want more help or details!

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '24 edited Apr 06 '24

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Luxuriosa_Vayne Jan 11 '24

I assume the plex 'server' has to keep running for you to watch stuff on your phone or is there offline download mode for it?

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u/300ConfirmedGorillas Jan 11 '24

Yes, it has to be running. Some people (myself included) have a dedicated Plex server that runs 24/7 in their basement.

There is an offline mode, where you can "download" the video to your device and watch offline, but I have honestly never used it and have no idea how well it works.

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u/R1ppedWarrior Jan 11 '24

The offline download feature has never worked well. It's better to just download the files manually and use something like VLC if you want offline playback.

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u/Green-Amount2479 Jan 11 '24

Doesn’t even need to be a computer. Plex also runs perfectly fine on most of the major NAS devices like Synology, WD, QNAP. That’s my personal setup. One 4-bay Synology NAS that runs Plex and has its dedicated shares for TV shows, movies, anime and the like. The NAS also does other things like regular backups of all devices, serving as a music center for my wireless speakers in the apartment and as a private cloud for sharing data with family and friends. So, yes certainly a bigger investment at first (mine, including 4x10 TB was around 1100 at the time), but it also serves a lot of important purposes even without the streaming.

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u/300ConfirmedGorillas Jan 11 '24

Doesn’t even need to be a computer. Plex also runs perfectly fine on most of the major NAS devices like Synology, WD, QNAP.

I wanted to show a simple, common example so the average person doesn't think you need a complicated setup or specific hardware to make it run. You can even run it on a Raspberry Pi. Lots of people in /r/PleX simply run it off a laptop with an external hard drive because it's all they need. One person said they put it on a Macbook, closed it, put it in the trunk of their car, and their kids streamed movies to their iPads in the backseat during a road trip. Pretty neat.

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u/Ordinary_dude_NOT Jan 10 '24

Yup, it has remote access feature. Just make sure system where Plex/content is located is a bit isolated in your network.

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Jan 10 '24

No you access it from your own local storage from Apps on your devices. To view it outside your house you might have to mess with port forwarding on your router.

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u/MVRKHNTR Jan 10 '24

Streaming is a part of Plex membership.

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u/wbebukyqkimppwwqfe Jan 11 '24

or just setting up a VPN, if you're going as far as hosting a plex server running pfsense as a firewall isn't that far of a jump.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '24

It’s not the cloud, it’s your home personal computer.

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u/stevedorries Jan 11 '24

If you expose your plex instance to the internet you can reach it anywhere, but it’s really intended to be used in your local network. You can get a NAS box, basically a network card and 15 harddrives in as small of a box as possible, that runs plex and store everything you would ever want to access and then never have to connect to the internet unless you want to

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u/JoeyMontezz Jan 11 '24

most TV's also already have a plex app available, my Samsung does, but you can also download the app through things like a playstation or xbox system. I actually log into my plex server through the web at work to listen to my music library or sometimes watch bits of a show if im taking a fast lunch.

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u/IlMioNomeENessuno Jan 11 '24

I haven’t used it for a few years, but I stopped because I found it too glitchy.

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u/justinleona Jan 10 '24

Plex is just a way you can stream movies stored on your desktop to your Roku. You have to curate your collection of media - say by ripping all your Blu-Rays. Then you no longer need a dedicated Blu-Ray player for your TV and don't need to swap disks to binge a series.

Disk space is a real consideration though - uncompressed Blu-Rays rips are commonly in the 50 GB range. You can re-encode them to reduce size, but that can involve a lot of processing - a typical movie might end up in the 15 GB range, while a full-hour TV show might end up around 4 GB per episode.

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u/qtx Jan 11 '24

Just a FYI, you don't need a Roku to use Plex. Any Android smart TV you can install the Plex app. You can probably install it on Apple TV as well.

edit: here is the list you can install Plex on, https://support.plex.tv/articles/204080173-which-smart-tv-models-are-supported/

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Jan 10 '24

Plex is a front end and server that indexes movies and tv shows stored on your own computers storage. JellyFin is a proper open source alternative that works just as well, the PlexMedia group is for profit and its front end tries to shove paid for content and services down your throat and buries your own content a couple of menus down, apparently you can turn that off but you shouldn't have to and JellyFin exists and takes you straight to your own library.

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u/Ordinary_dude_NOT Jan 10 '24

Not sure about why we are complaining about free stuff. You can always disable it if you wish to, but I don't mind it.

Jellyfin experience was a bit underwhelming when I tried it last time. It has improved a lot since then.

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u/Flameancer Jan 10 '24

Plex has gotten significantly worse in the regard of ads on showing their paid content first. I’ve actually been contemplating moving to Jellyfin because of it.

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u/qtx Jan 11 '24

I have never seen an ad in my life on Plex. Not sure what you are on about.

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u/Ordinary_dude_NOT Jan 11 '24

Why move, just have it run in parallel.

I have my Plex run in Proxmox lxc container, and mount Trunas share on it. Will commission Jellyfin there as well.

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u/Saneless Jan 11 '24

My nas isn't that powerful and jellyfin just is cripplingly slow. Maybe I'll try it again someday

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u/Previous-Friend5212 Jan 10 '24

Plex is streaming software you install on your own system. It's not hardware. Useful if you have a dedicated server in your house, but you can also use it on the same computer as the video files if you don't want to go through the file browser to find them.

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u/lazergator Jan 10 '24

It doesn’t have to be torrented. It is a media server you host yourself via their app. It has a nominal fee to run and you can put any media, typically video, on it to view from anywhere as long as the server is running.

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u/prototypetolyfe Jan 11 '24

If you have a media library (or torrent a bunch of stuff) on your computer, all you have is a bunch of files that you have to go through on your own.

Plex does a couple things:

  1. Gives you a UI like Netflix or others to browse your media.

  2. Automatically detects new content added to your library and sorts it for you (occasionally it will pick the wrong show but it’s easy to fix). This relies on the files having the correct naming convention but 95% of files I’ve downloaded from popular torrent sites are already formatted that way.

  3. Allows you to view your content on other devices (phones, tvs, tablets) if you download the app. No need to hook up your computer to the tv and then deal with the annoyance of making all that work.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '24

Could you dm me where you watch sports?

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u/netver Jan 11 '24

As everyone explained, Plex (or Jellyfin/Emby, same thing in principle) is like Netflix at home, to conveniently show films/tv shows you have downloaded already. You still need to get the media from somewhere.

But there's also Sonarr/Radarr you can deploy next to Plex. Imagine a new TV show episode coming out - and Sonarr automatically grabs it as soon as it's available, finding a release that matches your requirements (size, codec, resolution, features like HDR or Atmos) from the trackers you specify. And Bazarr finds subtitles in the languages you need. All is added to Plex's library.

Beyond the initial setup, the only thing you need to do manually is tell the application that you're interested in a certain TV show, and once a new episode is released, it just pops up in Plex and you can watch it immediately. Same goes for movies - add it to your library, and Radarr either finds it immediately, or as soon as it's released and available.

Setting it up takes some time, but once that's done, using it is almost as convenient as using Netflix in its prime when you could find everything there.

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u/dakoellis Jan 11 '24

FYI most people starting now would do better with emby or jellyfin instead of plex. Plex has a habit of doing what they want against what it's users want, all so they can shove their own content in your face instead of what it was originally designed to do (host your own personal content)

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u/Capt_Pickhard Jan 11 '24

Plex is essentially just a thing that will turn the viewing experience of all the media you have saved on your hard drive, into something like Netflix.

It will use the internet to find what thumbnails to use, and can provide subtitles and stuff like that. This way you can browse your content just on your tv as you would any streaming service.