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Plex Cloud Means Saying Goodbye To the Always-On PC (theverge.com)
Finally, you don't need an always-on PC or any other network-attached storage device if you want to use Plex's media player. The company has announced that it now allows you to stream TV shows and movies from your own collection via a new online option called Plex Cloud. From a report on The Verge: Plex is giving the world another reason to subscribe to Plex Pass subscriptions today with the launch of Plex Cloud. As the name suggests, Plex Cloud eliminates the need to run the Plex Media Server on a computer or Networked Attached Storage (NAS) in your house. It does, however, require a subscription to Amazon Drive ($59.99 per year for unlimited storage) and the aforementioned Plex Pass ($4.99 per month or $39.99 per year). Plex Cloud functions just like a regular Plex Media Server giving you access to your media -- no matter how you acquire it -- from an incredibly broad range of devices. Most, but not all Plex features are available in today's beta.
Instead of paying once, I can pay every month! I love the Cloud!
So I get to spend $100 a year to avoid using an old garbage PC with beefed up storage and have to rely on someone else to serve me my own stuff, hoping the connection remains strong?
This sounds horrible.
This is either going to be shutdown IMMEDIATELY by the copyright trolls, or its a trap set by the copyright trolls
Yep, I'll stick with my $150 for a NAS with hard drives that actually powers up and down on demand. I'm not seeing how exactly this is an advantage, maybe unlimited storage but I don't need that.
...something I could do at home with a low-end shoebox computer (or better yet, an old cast-off box with a little SSD and a big platter drive stuffed into it) that would be incredibly cheaper over time, electricity included.
And wait - who said I had to have the damned thing on 24/7 at home? I boot it when I turn the TV on - takes less time to start up than the TV does these days thanks to SSD *shrug*.
Seriously - if I subscribed to this service, I'd be damned embarrassed to say that I did and claim that I'm a geek at the same time...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Quick, to the cloud!
Slashdot means never saying goodbye to the Slashvertisement.
I would seriously consider Plex Cloud if Netflix, HBO Now, and a few other streaming services weren't seriously eating into my monthly cap from Cox. Maybe the Google Fiber elitist will have more fun with this...
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Better yet the content is unencrypted! Can you say secondary liability? Also if you've got a lifetime Plex Pass this is currently included, but yeah I'm so not hot on this at all.
Haven't heard of it.
I'll stick with my modded NSLU2 with UnSlung firmware and Twonkyserver software. It uses almost no power, a wall wart and a few flashdrives.
Where do you get a NAS for $150? Is it one with 4 drives and RAID?
I was watching one under $200 for a while on Amazon, but never ended up buying it.. (I think it may have been a slightly older model too).
They seem WAY more expensive than that.
I've been a avid Plex user for almost 2 years now. A bit over a year ago I bought a storage array NAS just for dedicated Plex storage, and built a i5 media center system that acts as Plex server and a few other things so I don't have to leave a power hungry gaming desktop on all the time. Previous to that I only kept some content on disk, and backed up media to CD's, then DVD, then Bluray. Combined, I have somewhere north of 2.5TB of content. Charter in my area offers only 60mbit/4mbit service, with 150mbit/5mbit service as a $50 upgrade. That's over 150hours to upload A week straight. Then content, when I add it, has to be uploaded. It makes no sense to download content, only to upload it, to stream/download it again. With GoPro 4K 60dps footage I have taking up SEVERAL gigs, it's just way too much to upload to Amazon, let alone upload the small trimmed down clips I want to YouTube sometimes. Maybe in the future, if ISP's in my area decide to offer actual upload speeds. As it stands if I download at 60mbit, 50-75% of my upload bandwidth is spent in just TCP acknowledgements and overhead. And symmetrical business speed is offered via Fiber only here at costs of $500+/mo.
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=HowTos#How_to_Create_a_Bootable_USB:_For_Linux
Too lazy to Google? No problem: Live USB Creator. Have fun!
Yeah, an iso...because you don't know what you're doing.
Adding yet another duck to the ISP / Netflix /Hulu flock doesn't seem very compelling to a rapidly-shrinking middle class.
https://www.htpcguides.com/ins... You're welcome.
I don't want a computer running full time and using electricity. I also don't want to pay per month for the cloud.
I use Infuse with an Apple TV in one room and a Fire TV in another, connected to a shared hard drive plugged into my router. Works great and needs virtually no computing power on the sharing end.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
To include: Most, but not all Plex features are available in today's beta. Some of the missing capabilities include Camera Upload and Offline Sync, though those will come in the future. Other features missing in Plex Cloud include DLNA support, Cloud Sync, Media Optimizer, and the newly launched Plex DVR. Note that Plex Cloud is not a copy of your local Plex server and Plex, as of today, doesn’t mention any type of media migration tool.
Wow! Sounds great!
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Hey, that's amazing!
Until smart TV's and digital stream analysis on the new audio out non-port of your phone decide this is a DRM violation and decide to block you from actually watching and/or listening to any of this.
Assuming enough economic zones begin offering Basic Incomes to their citizens, businesses will design and price packages to evenly consume the monthly amount. Great for the businesses to have a constant flow of cash. Great for the payment processors to skim their percent off the top. Great for three letter agencies that can watch these transactions - either financial or data streams - to learn about devices / versions / locations and of course content. Arguably Great for consumers so they don't have to "think" about managing finances - $X coming in, $Y going out, who needs to save?
Not great for those who eschew consolidation of financial or informative power.
This would provide an advantage for me if I used Plex, as my upload speed is nonexistent. Though this does seem like a risky move on their part as they'll undoubtedly get hit with shitload of DMCAs and may get sued for "promoting piracy"
Doesn't make much difference to me, though. I'm perfectly happy with my Kodi/NAS configuration.
Though hooking usenet up to a e3 instance could be amusing.
No sir I dont like it.
Anyone who buys into this has not been paying attention: These "cloud"-based businesses vanish like the mist once their funding has dried up and there is no growing revenue stream, and if you've invested your time and data with them, you're screwed.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Given my ISP's monthly cap of 100GB per month, it will take me about 30 months, nearly 3 years, to get all my music files into Plex's cloud. Meanwhile, I won't be able to use my Internet connection for anything else while I am uploading the music files.
I used to use plex. I've moved to emby.
Under linux, you might as well give up and run it under docker as they are very messy about their depedencies, but at least that's not too complicated.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If your serving media files you realy do not want classic raid. Snapraid and the like are a much better option for a large volume of seldom/never modified storage. This way drives no used can spin down.
No sir I dont like it.
...to see what Plex and Amazon does about all the pirated data ;)
... looked good for a media solution. Just what I thought I was looking before. Just before committing to something that did everything (and more)... no playback of DVD-rips. Not something they wanted to do with their spreading out into stuff like this. Yes, I could rip to whatever container format it is this week but with the odd forced sub-title issue and sound sync and extra time vs. chucking space at is and ripping in a minute or two why bother.
Which would be fine, but this was functionality they removed deliberately. Didn't use it then. Won't use it now.
How the hell am I supposed to upload 12TB of videos?!
I just looked at the FAQ for SnapRAID. Looks fairly complex. Especially since it is "just" media files, I theoretically wanted something I could basically set up once and then would survive one disk failure.. If I lost it all, I wouldn't be too bummed.
Also, wouldn't you need another machine up and doing the snap raid 'backup' or sync or whatever you all it? (A NAS is all in one, the other machines can be off/asleep.) and/or would a Raspberry PI or somesuch be adequate for that?
Do you really expect anyone to believe that it isn't an ad?
My home setup is:
- home assembled PC, 4 core CPU and 16 GB of ram
- Ubuntu 14.04
- ZFS (8 TB)
- MakeMKV and Handbrake
- Ruko box attached to the TV and home network
Total one time cost $1500.00
Sure Plex is charging $40.00 per year but notice I control the entire setup. No one throttling the bandwidth between the Plex Cloud and my TV and no one selling the information about my DVD / Blu-Ray collection to advertisers.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
I've used Plex for a long time now, and I've seen them try to extract additional funds or have me create an account on their servers. I grabbed a good APK and don't upgrade the server or client software anymore. It's entirely frustrating and they've repeatedly shown that they don't understand their users. Their users are so much more likely to be data hoarders than avid adopters of "cloud" services. Most users are going to be in a situation where their upload speeds are way too low to make this a viable option. They'd do much better trying to replace software that feeds Plex, like sabnzbdplus.
Or will different rules apply to Plex than to Kim Dotcom's Mega site?
Plex Cloud also means you lose control of your stuff. They will sell information on what you store/view in a heartbeat. It will also make you more dependant on an internet connection, so when your connection goes down, you are SOL. Oh and just wait until it says your files were deleted because of copyright infringement. Lapse on a payment and they'll outright delete your entire collection.
Invest in a large SSD and put it in a NAS that can accept multiple drives. If you run out of room, buy another large SSD and plug it in. Unlike HDDs, when SSDs fail, they are still readable, so RAID isn't actually a requirement. Do this and you won't have any of these issues with the cloud.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Reasons this is terrible: 1. Plex sucks. 2. This is nothing but a money-harvesting aimed at the clueless, under the guise of "convenience." 3. Bandwidth requirements. 4. Moving all your media to "the cloud" for money is waaay safer, smarter and more reliable than, say, controlling it yourself locally for free. 5. The cost far eclipses the annual 1/3 of a pittance you'd pay for the electricity required to run basically any local device as a media server.
The appeal of Plex over a plain old Kodi setup is the associated online service that includes central authentication and access to its well-supported client. Just about every desktop and mobile OS, set top box and smart TV has some kind of Plex software available; Plex has buy-in as a "legitimate" streaming service in a way that some other freeware applications just don't right now.
The core media server functionality is all well and good (and hasn't changed much in years), but the capability to add in hooks for online content in any way, shape or form without turning in to Kodi's free-for-all of pirate web scrapers probably drives a lot of this. Plex's forums are filled with any number of people asking for some random extra functionality, including the ability to play videos from Google Drive sources or use off-premises storage without invoking LAN-type file sharing protocols. In other words, this is something people do actually ask for, not just a solution looking for a problem to solve.
Plex only charges per-client (usually a one-time $5 on any platform) or for a monthly or lifetime Plex Pass. I have a lifetime Plex Pass, which I bought because I like the project and not because I have any need of any Plex Pass features. I don't think these costs are in any way outrageous. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that they're "extracting additional funds" above and beyond those things.
(slaker is my /. ID. Posting AC because public terminal + lazy)
I immediately knew something was fishy when I tried to connect to the local server, and the login page didn't work. I run Firefox with NoScript installed. I had the local server IP whitelisted, but the page ignored all button clicks. I click on the NoScript icon... And discover that it's trying to pull in boatloads of JavaScript from Plex.tv.
"WRONG!" exclaimed I. The whole point of a local media server such as Plex is for all media-serving code and resources to be hosted locally on my server hardware. The moment you start reaching outside the LAN to do anything, you are no longer a local server.
This discovery basically shattered any alleged positive value Plex may have had, since its primary function -- the basis on which it was sold to me -- turned out to be a lie. I promptly uninstalled it.
Now, it seems Plex has dropped the pretense altogether, and are just another disk farm outside my control. Good luck with that, guys; I'm sure you'll be able to beat Apple, Google, and Amazon at that game.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I will give them benefit of the doubt and say that in a future scenario, it could be a great thing. If bandwidth caps were gone and up/down bandwidth in the US were better, it would be usable. If a supportive infrastructure were built up so that you could sideload/torrent from the web/iTunes/Amazon/etc. straight to your storage and it could be set to auto-upload mobile video (like many storage sites do now), that would be something worth having. You could essentially have access to your libraries on the road and at home and you wouldn't have to tie a PC up with downloads. However, bandwidth as it is makes it a terrible proposal.
No extra machine and it's a few lines of config per drive. Being able to use mixed size drives to max capacity is a big advantage. The huge advantage is if you loose 2 drives (with single drive parity) you only loose the files on those drives each file and the directory structure to go with it is on each drive. Long term it's got power savings as each piece of media is read off a single drive meaning the rest can be spun down.
No sir I dont like it.
Sure, I'll be glad to upload my entire video collection of 20TB's which will take approximately 180 days of continuous uploading to Amazon's cloud drive (take longer with data caps because I'll have to restart it each month until it actually completes the 20TB uploads) where it is not encrypted nor well protected and whose contents will be completely indistinguishable from pirated content versus a ripped personal use copy. I am sure the MPAA would love to go after this data. I will gladly give over my hard earned money to Amazon to pay for this privilege. I'll give up my private server which I carefully created to consume less than 40 watts (currently running a 20W Atom 8 Core processor with 8 4TB drives in a ZFS array), offset with my use of many solar panels, to shift to a cloud data center consuming considerably more than 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. https://youtu.be/I5cYgRnfFDA
Yeah that's about as smart as buying a Tesla and thinking I am saving the environment by driving around with highly toxic batteries all getting their power from the grid, disregarding the fact that the grid is completely powered by burning coal, oil, and natural gas! Hey, maybe I can put the Tesla in Autodrive and watch my Plex cloud videos on the Tesla display panel using a cellular data plan and decapitate myself at 60Mph when a tractor trailer makes a u-turn in front of my Tesla.
Yeah, 20TB's is no joke. I go through the data now and then and transcode the video to more efficient smaller files to save space and prune data I really don't need to keep long term. But the Internet is my DVR and it's fully automated. Plex helped me realize the joys of cord cutting. I ripped a considerable library of content and yeah some of that content is downloaded and consumed and typically discarded. Love me some Plex.
I think I'll just stick to my personal server and sync connect to the iPad for offline viewing on the planes and trains as I have been doing. It makes zero sense for me to download content re-upload that content to a Plex server in the cloud unless I want to more easily share that content with friends which I am already doing with little trouble as its easy with a standalone server in my home. I do not trust cloud providers with my data and you shouldn't either.
https://youtu.be/J4LI_EqnJq8
You are almost certainly paying over $100 a year for electricity for a desktop PC as a server.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
2 drives, minimal RAID capabilities. I actually bought the skeleton one and picked up a couple drives on black Friday. For me it has been working pretty good for a few years, just have to wait 5-10 minutes for it to come online sometimes. But I primarily use it to share development files between computers, rather than a media server.
https://www.amazon.com/Buffalo...
What do you mean no extra machine? Do you mean you can use SnapRAID on something like a Synology 4 disk NAS? (Just one of the ones I was looking at today..)
and AnyDVD. Can you still rip your own dvds? I know Disney did all sorts of nasty crap to DVDs to make them hard to rip (I used to rip the ones I bought and give the rips to the kids so I didn't have to buy them again in 4 months when they got hopelessly scratched, kids are grown so I don't bother anymore).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I have a 3TB Seagate NAS ... it only cost me $120
Or put you plex server on a laptop, and turn it off when your done.
Or, if you have a roku 3, put your files on a USB drive, and watch them from there.
Or just use an hdmi cable.
Or use a Raspberry Pi running Kodi.
If so, the electricity expense would no be that great.
I tried running a Plex server off a Raspberry Pi 2, but found it a little too slow.
Of a Plex server. Why would I use up my bandwith when I can host them local on my LAN using a NAS. NAS servers are cheap, especially say if you get a QNAP TS-251+ and some harddrives. Makes for a nice NAS server to run the Plex media server on.
Kinda stupid, the whole point of plex is that its local.
Might as well get netflix if you want to stream stuff.
...Piracy galore! Give me your password...
I love my Plex server / Roku client setup. I don't own a Plex Pass, $5/mo seems way overpriced to me so I've never purchased one. At $1-2/mo I'd do it in a heartbeat in order to support them. That being said Plex always tries to create solutions for problems that don't exist to get you to pay into their monthly plan. I'm capped on my bandwidth so this is a non starter for me. Even if I wasn't capped I could still stream my shows using the free version. Idea -- give me ala carte, I'll take the iOS app for $1-2/month, you can keep the rest, I have no use for it.
Some background as to my 'digital media evolution'
1. Hard drive in my local PC with my media on it
2. Moved to external drive, once I started needing some mobility
3. Switched to external raid array, once I started running out of space
4. Microserver with Plex, once I was tired of lugging hardware around (skipped the NAS phase)
5. Automated media grabbing, e.g. sonarr and couchpotato once I was tired of manually downloading stuff
I'm now at the stage where I have a *lot* of media (about 10TB?), most of which I don't really want to lose (e.g. in case of HDD failure) - but in the scheme of things not really that important. As in, I want a backup copy, but the costs are somewhat prohibitive. Lately I've been considering cloud storage for backing up these files an acceptable compromise, since it'd be cheaper than buying HDDs which would need replacing every couple of years anyway.
Bandwidth for uploading that data is a concern, but I believe there are services where you can send off a hard-drive for them to copy rather than uploading it all yourself.
So yes... Timely. It wouldn't be a replacement for my media server, I'd keep that going, but it would have benefits other than just being a glorified backup. Family being able to make use of it without hammering *my* internet connection/server for example.
It would be awesome if there was some way for my home computer to become a server on the internet, and I could download or stream files straight from my computer! That would be so cool. Someone should invent that.
Yes, the level of difficulty getting it installed would vary but pretty much all your 4 disk nas boxes are Linux often on top of x86 with various methods to add 3rd party software. Mind you buying the equivalent to better hardware and using any of the number of nas software or simply your preferred Linux is cheaper and does not paint you into a corner. Mind you I would not buy or suggest a low end consumer synology device it does not have any facilities for bit rot detection they just released btrfs support in the 6x but only for higher end models and frankly they are extremely under powered especially for the price at the home/soho level.
No sir I dont like it.
I highly recommend the Synology NAS boxes, they are great. The one I used to have however didn't have enough horsepower to run Plex server, so I had to run the Plex from my domain controller.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The very little bit of research I've done seems to say you need the 'play' versions ('play' is in the name) to do Plex re-encoding. Others can work as media servers if no reencoding is needed. At least based on what I saw on Amazon in the past few days, the non-Play Synology 4 or 5 drive boxes are a bit under $300 at best price, the play ones are a couple hundred more.
Could I stream a non-reencoded HD show to an iPhone or iPad out of the house? At least VLC can play raw MPEG files (the old one, before Dolby Digital support was removed), and there's at least one pay app that can too. Since unfortunately the Tivo streaming/downloading is so broken, I'd think about doing it with Plex if I didn't have to reencode things. (Disclaimer: yes, I know the Tivo Stream hardware does hardware reencoding.. But as I said, I can manually download shows and play them in VLC with no reencoding.)
I have been fighting the Tivo issues as well, it seems that there is no good solution for moving tv shows to more durable formats, that works well and in an automated fashion.
The Synology NAS I had allowed the use of DLNA for streaming, but I am not an Apple person, so I don't know if that is supported by their equipment.
There was also some kind of Synology Video app, but I never actually used it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?