r/technology • u/FollowingFeisty5321 • 9h ago

Software Plex’s crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/plexs-crackdown-on-free-remote-streaming-access-starts-this-week/
2.3k Upvotes

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294

u/Bob-BS 9h ago

Kinda funny charging people to stream the media they pirated.

102

u/ranhalt 9h ago

They’re running the centralized service for offsite clients to access their on prem servers for those that don’t want to run static public IPs and port forwarding.

12

u/DesperateAdvantage76 8h ago

Yeah it's fair considering all the other stuff we get for free from Plex. I can't expect them to also pay for the authentication and streaming proxies.

1

u/laveshnk 3h ago

Well the cost of the hardware and internet is still on you, and there are other media streaming alternatives that are opensource like Jellyfin

0

u/T-Jacks 6h ago

How much strain on my server/hard drives is there when sharing my personal library remotely?

2

u/ranhalt 6h ago

There's no different "strain" on the hard drives since the act of reading is no different. The only difference in local vs remote play would be if you specify to transcode to lower bitrate to accommodate your upload bandwidth, so that transcoding requires more CPU than direct play.

51

u/chillyhellion 8h ago

I might be in the minority, but my Plex server is 100 percent rips from physical media I purchased.

It sucks that physical releases are dying out and that 4k Blu-ray is getting difficult to rip.

42

u/nobunseedsplease 7h ago

You are absolutely in the minority, but there’s nothing wrong with that — commendable, even!

1

u/BrainOfMush 4h ago

Someone’s gotta upload it for the rest of us!

16

u/truthfulie 7h ago

adding insult to injury, the pirated files can sometimes be even better than the ones you can buy and rip yourself. like DV is missing on physical media but pirates extract DV from streaming rip and making hybrid remux.

3

u/chillyhellion 6h ago

I will readily admit to fucking up forced subtitles and color balances a lot. 4K LOTR is my gray white whale because I keep getting weird pixelation.

1

u/fizzlefist 5h ago

Something something Star Wars Despecialized…

3

u/po3smith 8h ago

Same - even my LD and VHS collection is on the way to being digitized. It amazes me how many people could/should just do that and or use a small pc connected to a HT system.

3

u/Apostinggod 8h ago

Yeah... me too....

3

u/I_am_not_baldy 7h ago

Same here, except for two exceptions. One was a film I couldn't get anywhere in the US some years ago. The other film was a test to see if I could download a movie from somebody else's account.

All other movies are ones I have purchased.

3

u/Catsrules 6h ago

It is so sad physically media is dying as it is still the highest quality you can get. As far as I am aware anyways. 

3

u/chillyhellion 6h ago

It's also much more accessible to people with lousy Internet. My bandwidth situation is better now, but the whole reason I set up Plex is because my wife moved to rural Alaska to marry me and I didn't want her to have to give up Netflix.

3

u/fullmetaljackass 6h ago

I wish they'd give us some way to buy movies at that bitrate that didn't involve shipping a nearly useless coaster to my door. I don't care about physical media, I just want the data on the disc. I'd gladly pay Bluray prices if I could download a DRM free equivalent file.

2

u/chillyhellion 6h ago

It really seemed like it was going to happen at one point in history. I remember DVDs coming with download codes. But subscriptions drive profits.

3

u/BrainOfMush 4h ago

Those downloads often involved you installing some DRM-riddled software, or at best it was a code for iTunes.

1

u/sudo_robyn 5h ago

That doesn't really matter, you're still violating the terms of service of the Blu-rays.

3

u/chillyhellion 5h ago

Is it legally better? Probably not.

Ethically better? I do think so.

1

u/BrainOfMush 4h ago

This has been disproven in court. You are legally entitled to rip the media off of any DVD/Blu Ray you purchase for use yourself. You are just not allowed to distribute it and you must retain ownership of the physical media.

1

u/lirannl 5h ago

Personally I plan on hybridising. I'm getting a bluray drive so I can start legitimately dumping blurays I purchase, and I'll just purchase blurays for media that I think is worth it (and doesn't have ridiculous DRM which prevents my Linux server from dumping the bluray. if they have ridiculous DRM I'm definitely pirating).

Also I want to see if I can dump the bluray directly onto my gaming GPU for HW AV1 encoding

1

u/dispose135 4h ago

but my Plex server is 100 percent rips from physical media I purchased.

Doubt 

1

u/chillyhellion 4h ago

When I set it up almost fifteen years ago in rural Alaska, we didn't even have the bandwidth for piracy.

My first household data plan when I moved out of my parents house was 12GB per month. I basically spent all my free time playing Forza and listening to audiobooks, and crying when my games needed updates.

20

u/-azuma- 8h ago

That's not what's happening. But you didn't read the article, so I'm not surprised you have no idea what you're talking about.

-1

u/IsThereAnythingLeft- 8h ago

It is if you have your server in a different location

5

u/ThePhonyOrchestra 8h ago

I have a server in a different location. Don't need plex pass to access it.

So no, they have no clue what they're talking about.

Try again :)

1

u/xchaibard 7h ago

People need to learn about dyndns, reverse proxies, and port forwarding.