“I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff,” a user said of Plex’s Week in Review email and Discover Together feature.
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. 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.
This has greatly alarmed a wide swatch of Plex’s user base, who have blown up the Plex forums, the Discover Together blog post comment section, and Reddit with posts about disastrous overshares created by the feature. A sampling of posts: “Discover Together and Week in Review emails are a MASSIVE breach of privacy and trust!,” “Security breach: Why is my friend receiving notifications to rate movies I’ve watched?,” “Weekly review emails data leak,” “Plex crossed a line with ‘Your week in review’ emails today.’”
The feature is opt-out, meaning that many people were very surprised to get these emails and see this feature, as it’s up to users to proactively turn it off (instructions here and here).
“I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff (think classic ‘skinemax’ fare) from some server (it’s not mine) or Plex channel, and I am 100 percent sure they would be mortified to know that I know this,” one user wrote on the Plex Forums. “Now replace this friend, who’s just enjoying their downtime with some cheeky T&A, with a teenager who may be having difficulty figuring out feelings about their sexuality and are just trying to explore by watching LBGT dramas to see if anything there resonates or can help them figure things out. Suddenly, one of their intolerant friends or parents gets a detailed email report with a cheery title listing every little thing they’re watching…This is a dystopian nightmare of a feature and I honestly can’t believe it’s been rolled out as opt-out like this. SHAME ON YOU, PLEX!”
“I wonder how many people just had their week’s porn selections emailed to their Plex friends,” another user posted. “I just got an email about a friend’s watching habits which he definitely didn’t want to share. He insists he’s never opted into any data sharing, but…it went out anyway.”
“I’m sure there’s a certain percentage of people who want to know what kind of porn their grandma likes, but I’m hoping it’s not the majority,” another posted.
Otto Kerner, who is a moderator of the official Plex forums, said that porn viewing habits would only be shared if Plex can make a “match” of the media with online databases like IMDb. “Many pr0n titles are either not listed there at all [sic],” Kerner wrote. It’s worth noting, however, that there are many adult titles on IMDb.
There are hundreds of posts about the issue on the official Plex forums, many of which point out that many Plex users chose to use the service in the first place because it is a “self-hosted” alternative to streaming that many people go into believing they will have more control and privacy than is offered by Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming services. Plex is also used by many users to play and stream files that they have illegally pirated (the ability to do this is largely behind the initial popularity of Plex), though the company has been trying to move away from the perception that most people are using it to play pirated content. “The fact that this data is available to you AT ALL … That is just … Mind boggling, and completely against the very notion of self hosting,” one user wrote. “I feel betrayed that was done without telling me that this data was going to be collected. Let alone acted upon. It’s dangerous. Certain entities would LOVE to have that data…which could mean jail time for some.”
“The ‘See what your friends are watching’ will be great for all the people with secret porn libraries. Or when you start watching a Jan 6th documentary, and you see Aunt Becky start commenting about it being part of a satanic conspiracy,” a commenter on Plex’s blog post announcing the feature wrote. “I can also say that not one person I have talked to has ever liked the idea that I can see what they’re watching from my server.”
Plex did not respond to requests for comment sent from 404 Media. Plex employees have been posting regularly in the forums explaining that people can opt out of the data sharing, and have also said media watch “sync events,” which it uses to track viewing history, do not tell the company the nature of the file played: “There is no way to know whether something being ‘watched’ occurred because you went and saw it at the theater and then marked it on the Discover page when you got home, you watched through a personal Plex Media Server Library, or anything else.”
Plex is easier to set up and has more features that are more polished than what Jellyfin has. It’s also a more well known name and been available a lot longer and it’s app is available on a lot more devices including TVs themselves.
Jellyfin will one day be the superior option though once it’s more polished and caught up in these areas.
In what areas is Plex more polished, and what features does Jellyfin lack?
Jellyfin balloons to 6gb ram usage after a week while plex stays at 400mb.
The interface of jellyfin is way less polished and the actual video player UI has a bunch of bad decisions that push more technical babble to the end user that confuses more than helps
I run jellyfin and plex side by side. Everybody has preferred plex over jellyfin on my server.
Literally the only upside for jellyfin is admin created accounts not requiring the end user to sign up themselves.
I’ve been using jellyfin everyday for a few months on my (very tiny) debian server and have never experienced a memory spike like that. Handles music, HD video, even network streams without a hitch
Running in docker on my unraid server. Happens consistently without fail
Ya, I run it in a VM on my Proxmox host and it goes for months and months on end getting hammered by multiple users for every kind of file with zero issues.
Well, the article would seem to add one more giant upside for Jellyfin.
It handles all the dynamic DNS stuff out of the box for remote access. Took me a while to figure that out for Jellyfin (as opposed to VPN tunnel)
Doesn’t jellyfin still lack auto detecting hardware acceleration settings? Setting up quicksync transcode in Plex meant just mapping /dev/dri and checking use hw acceleration + use hw accelerated encoding and it just works. In jellyfin, according to the documentation (I mean just look at the size of that page… I’ve spent hours poring over every section trying to get my setup to work), you have to pass in the render group id in addition to passing /dev/dri, run a command inside the container to check capabilities, then it just says to “enable qsv and uncheck unsupported codecs” without any guidance on how to match the output of the command with the codec list. I kept getting playback errors so I resorted to using the Linux server docker container and referencing the Wikipedia page for quicksync to enable the codecs my CPU should be able to handle with quicksync.
They sorely need to make it just work out of the box with a single enable check box and have the rest of the settings auto detected and hidden under advanced. At least it should add (not present) or grey out every hardware acceleration device not detected like amd/nvidia on my nuc that’s just Intel, and the codecs should just auto set based on your hardware and show a warning if you enable something outside of the detected capabilities. I still can’t get opencl tone mapping to work despite having the opencl linuxserver mod so I’ve just resorted to VPP, my jellyfin users can just deal with it if it doesn’t look quite right.
How can setup get any easier than
apt install jellyfinand then going into a web UI to add a few folders?Plex is better at looking up show names, has an easier UI to set up more complicated stuff like hardware acceleration, has better clients across a variety of platforms… the only reason I’m using Jellyfin over Plex at this point is because I anticipate Plex shitting the bed. If you’re on Plex, there’s no reason to swap from it, and honestly if you’re comparing the two as a newbie, Plex is still a much easier option.
These are a lot of the core reasons why Plex is better. Setting up a media server is a lot more complicated than just installing the package in your favourite distro.