This makes me wonder if there's a luxury service somewhere providing the kind of access people want at an expensive, but reasonable price. So I don't have to go about building and maintaining a public resource.

r/plexshares on reddit is a sort of open secret.

Delete this.

Oh Come on, it’s the second result on google for “Plex reddit”.

Sure, but unless you use Reddit on a regular basis, why would you even consider adding "reddit" to the search query?

To be fair, just searching for "plex" does return Reddit results, though not on the first page (for me anyway, Google personalizes search results). It's no longer the Wild West of Internet, and it turns out information doesn't want to be free, it wants to live in invite-only areas who's members are vetted before invitation. DMCA take-downs can't be sent if the material can't be found.

Let me turn it around: who are you trying to hide it from?

Anyone with a tiny bit of Internet knowledge is going to know how big a site Reddit is (#6 on Alexa for the US).

Easy: The MPAA and every other organization that views copyright infringement as an evil that must be quashed and would seek to shut it down.

To be clear, I'm willing to pay for content, and have a small library of shows and movies sprawled across Google, Amazon, and Apple's offerings that I "own", it's just far more convenient to have all my media in one place: Plex.

subreddits can be made private & invite only if they wish not to be found on the open web

>We bought a retired datacenter rack and everyone contributes a few bucks a month to cover running costs.

Everyone does a bit of pirating here and there, and I think the media companies realize it's a cost of doing business. But something tells me they wouldn't look too fondly on an organised, multi-user pirated content distribution platform...

Here in Canada there are some big chains (Best Buy, Staples) being sued for telling people at point-of-purchase that they can watch free content on an Android box.

It has become fairly common. I have multiple friends with large, shared Plex libraries. This isn't sharing with the public, it's sharing among known friends.

I somehow doubt that streaming platforms will finally be the ones to end piracy once and for all via lawsuits.

There's a difference between pirating something, and distributing pirated content, both ethically and legally.

Mind you, most peer-to-peer sharing protocols work by having everyone be distributor and downloader at the same time.

This is why they are "peer to peer". The bittorrent protocol for example downloads files in fragments, and every fragment that you have downloaded becomes available for other clients (i.e. you start becoming a server as soon as you have downloaded one fragment)

Maybe you could argue that doing so for profit is different legally but its hard to argue that freely enabling others to do what you are doing is fundamentally ethically worse than doing so yourself.

I don't think there is a fundamental moral right to a particular pattern of bits in the first place to defend.

I'm interested in your view on how it is an ethical difference.

You mean like the pirate bay?

we're in the weeds now, but: sort of. the pirate bay doesn’t distribute anything — it just indexes it — but actually getting content via the pirate bay involves torrenting the content. and torrent is a tech that makes every downloader also an uploader to peers.

You mean like popcorntime used to be ?

that is an awesome grassroots solution :)

btw if anybody wants to add some goodies to plex, i created browser extensions that add trailers and random sorting. check them out!

https://github.com/conceptualspace/metatrailer-for-plex

https://github.com/conceptualspace/shuffle-for-plex

what are you using to run this code-wise? I was thinking of making something similar.

Freenas + plex, deluge and openvpn for torrenting (inside a container), iris to host the web front-end, scripts are all just python. I'm sure there are more legit solutions for web scraping but I just parse the html and it hasn't broken on me so far. One set of sites to query for "top x sites", pass titles along to torrent aggregator searches when there are no magnets. Then the important practical step is a background queue to re-encode the video to a standard format and bitrate. I'd rather not open source it because of how dirty the setup is, I just hacked something together one weekend and it's been running for almost 5 years now with minimal maintenance.

Edit: I think iris was something I did more recently, I don't remember what it was using originally. I just wanted to play with go a little bit. The "front end" itself is a single page with an upload button and a box to paste a magnet link, it's not like it's doing much. Plex does all the real work here.

Sonarr & Radarr + torrent client and come kind of front end for users to request content are the typical go-tos for Freenas + Plex setups.

When effort is required is as important as how much effort is required. Sure, if I want to watch something on my Plex server I have to have put the content on the server in the first place, but I can do that at my leisure. When I want to watch that content, it’s there, and I don’t have to spend 10 minutes with my dinner getting cold while I try to find the thing I want to watch.

Like I said, the original goal was to have something to stream old movies. There is no service I could reliably find things pre-1970, especially the cardboard era of special effects. I'm a huge fan of the hammer horror films and every now and again I'll want to watch Mothra or Metropolis. Good luck finding anywhere to stream them outside of the "watch x online" sites which generally have poor quality or are mislabeled.

The torrenting features were tacked on later, and honestly I don't think it was much work at all. Setting up a proxy credit card just to sign up for another subscription service is more annoying to me than playing with server gear for a weekend.