I tried testing a movie from my home server in plex through firefox and repeatedly got this message, even after reloading.
I knew that they had paywalled the apps on mobile and streaming from outside the network but now they have also blocked watching your own movies through your own hardware.
I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.
Even a pop up that says "we need you to donate please" would have been fine. make it pop up before every movie, play donation ads before any movie but straight up disabling the app is kinda cruel.
Anyway, i have switched to jellyfin and it is insanely good. please give it a try. you can run it alongside plex with not issues (at least i had none) and compare the two.
In any case, good luck. Let me know if you need help.
It's pretty rare that a company starts taking away free features and doesn't end up fucking payers in the end.
The biggest bar to Jellyfin is TV clients, the second biggest is security.
TV clients can be fixed with a one-time purchase of a $20 android TV stick. If viewing your familys ARR content isn't worth $20 you probably don't need to do it anyway.
Security for remote streaming is a harder thing to handle. Most people are capable of port forwarding, But just hanging a smallish public project out there in the open is always a dicey proposition. It honestly needs real fail2ban, probably SSL, 2FA and password complexity requirements.
We could probably make a jellyfin helper container to handle some of this. Walk people through Let's Encrypt, dynDNS, port forwarding tests, add fail2ban with a firewall, maybe even slap suricata in it.
We need to convince the project to add 2FA and password complexity requirements.
I don't know guys what do you think is it crazy? does it make sense? Would anybody actually use it?
You can address the 2fa by putting it behind something like authelia, but still, the project needs to step it up
I thought that you can still access media directly via the URL without any authentication, how would authelia change that?
Yes! You just have to set up your reverse proxy to send everything through it and it'll block the unauthenticated access.
The downside is that apps stop working since they don't have a way to authenticate with authelia. I've installed it as a PWA on my phone and use an old laptop with the TV interface on my TV, but it's not perfect
Are you sure that works? I'm pretty sure they mentioned that reverse proxies are an unsupported (and not working) use case with Jellyfin, but I might have to look into authelia some time then.
I just put it behind an HAProxy a few minutes ago, It appears to be fine. You just need something capable enough to handle web sockets. I've made it all the way through an episode of The real monsters without any problems.
Again, you're not going to be able to 2FA it that way, what I'm looking at doing is IP whitelisting it in HAProxy using a small web helper that is 2FA, accessed via the same port but on a separate path.
Both jellyfin and authelia support reverse proxies.
Here's jellyfin's guide: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/reverse-proxy/
And here's authelia's: https://www.authelia.com/integration/proxies/introduction/
There's some restrictions (like websocket support) but it's not too bad to set up.
Still, if you don't need to expose it to the internet, put it behind a vpn.