reddit: nico_is_not_a_god pokemon romhacks: Dio Vento

  • 0 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle
  • Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.

    Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.


  • I dunno about that. Plex has lots of market share and plenty of “well I bought the pass when it was $60/$90” people aren’t gonna be personally affected by them locking more and more functionality behind the pass. So they’ll keep using it and recommending it and talking about it, and the centralized account management stuff (which Jellyfin won’t copy, because not having that is the point of selfhosting) will always be more convenient than setting up VPNs or other tools like external auth for Jellyfin sharing over the internet.

    Discourse about this everywhere always boils down to the same comment: “I bought the plex pass and honestly I’d do it again for $300 just to not deal with handling my own authentication system, plex remote play Just Works”. Or something like “I refuse to use a $20 HDMI android TV box instead of my ad-ridden smart TV or PlayStation 5, and those don’t have apps for JF”. These guys are literally in this thread, on Lemmy, the Reddit for people so FOSS-friendly they use Lemmy instead of Reddit.



  • but it’s not, because “i got it so cheap for $60 ten years ago / $90 five years ago / $120 yesterday” and “securely opening a port and enabling OAuth for jellyfin takes more than one click”.

    The “lifetime” Plex Pass was a genius marketing move, because people are permanently inertia-locked into the cost they sunk. For nearly a decade now the refrain is “I just have a Plex pass. I bought it for $30 less than its current cost and it works great for me, sucks that it’s now $90/$120/$240 but IMO it’s worth it :)”. Don’t forget that making you pay $60 or $90 or $120 or $240 to use your own GPU for hardware encoding was always a scumware tactic, even if they put up a $15/mo subscription next to that one-time cost so that the one-time cost looks like “a good deal”.



  • Yes, they’re being advertised to. In theory this is because they might be clients for non-Pass servers in addition to yours. In practice, Plex could easily verify Plex client accounts that don’t run a server or have access to non-Pass servers and skip sending this marketing email to those accounts. What they’re doing is trying to convince your users they need to pay a sub fee (even though they don’t), because it’s free money in Plex’s pocket if the users do click the thing and say “welp, still cheaper than netflix”

    Any users of your plex-pass verified server do not need to pay anything to keep streaming it. You had to pay a lot more for the lifetime or subscription to enable it, but by doing so any users you share with don’t need to pay a dime. You reading this press release and seeing your users get emails and assuming that your users now need to pay for something isn’t you being stupid, it’s the intended result of their deliberately confusing messaging. One user shrugging and saying “guess it’s $7/mo now” is free money for the company.





  • And don’t forget that if you somehow lose access to the digital product called “v1.1.2” without losing access to your save file, you still can’t use that save file with the helpful little bit of plastic you have with v.1.0.0 on it. This is very possible with 3DS games, because the physical cartridge stores the save file but game updates are installed to the system memory/SD card. The 3DS also ties your licenses to the console, not to an account, which means that if you lose your 3DS but still have your copy of Smash Bros, replacing the 3DS will let you redownload the patch but not re-buy or re-download the DLC. Without piracy or buying a secondhand 3DS from someone who has the Smash DLC, you’d never be able to be Cloud on Smash 3DS again.

    Physical game copies have been practically irrelevant from a software preservation standpoint since the X360 and PS3. Nintendo took an extra gen to catch up as usual. The only meaningful preservation work that can be done for modern game consoles is cracking the console’s DRM so that even the “digital-only” games and all updates/DLC can also be backed up somewhere that will tolerate the death of all Nintendo servers and devices. Thankfully, Nintendo’s software has never had an era where this isn’t true by the end of the console’s lifespan (sometimes it becomes true really early, like with the Wii and Switch). We just have to hope that the homebrew wizards find something on the Switch 2, even if it’s a limited exploit that needs a hardware modchip and only works on launch models.











  • All my video media that’s easier to replace than preserve is on my NAS running openmediavault with mergerfs. If I lose a drive I can always just, you know, torrent the tv show again.

    My main PC (everything except the Steam game install directory) is backed up through KopiaUI to a folder on that mergerfs array that contains media that’s difficult/impossible to replace. Daily incremental backups.

    That folder is mounted on my PC through DOKAN, which tells Windows OS that it’s a local resource (it does this more thoroughly than just assigning a drive letter to a NAS folder through Windows’ built-in system). The PC, including the “sensitive NAS media” folder, is then backed up to Backblaze’s personal backup service ($99/yr, unlimited size with one-year versioning). The DOKAN step is required for this, since Backblaze doesn’t support mounted NAS drives or non-Windows systems (presumably they don’t want to use space on versioned encrypted backups of hundred-terabyte pirate movie collections).

    Oh, and my phone does one-way Syncthing to my PC, thus putting its files on the PC for Kopia and Backblaze to do their thing.