I use Hetzner as a seedbox and then have PLEX as my media server ran on the same hardware. It’s worked perfectly fine for years. But recently PLEX says they will be blocking Hetzner hosting in the next few weeks. I’ve been considering moving to Jellyfin for a while, but I’m worried they will do the same thing in future.
Does anyone know if that’s a real possibility?
Also, if I setup a VPN and just download stuff I torrent from my seedbox to a local PLEX server, would I be in any more risk of legal issues then I am now?
Am I looking at this completely wrong, and I should do something completely different?
To clarify what I am thinking of doing:
Keep my Hetzner as my seedbox and continue to download using my IPTorrents account. Setup a Local Plex or Jellyfin server and download from my seedbox to that local server that will be ran behind a VPN.
UPDATE: So this past weekend I did some testing and JellyFin is now my new Media Streaming software on my server. Going to take some time to learn how it works compared to PLEX, but so far things have been nearly 1 to 1. Thanks everyone for the help, I’m very grateful.
Thanks! I just found out about the auction option through this post. I’m curious, given the price per month, wouldn’t it be better to self host with similar hardware? Higher upfront cost but lower over time I’d think?
Just curious because I’m thinking about switching up my setup, self hosting Plex currently but lack the bandwidth that I’d likely get if I moved to a hetzner server.
Oh yeah, would be lower cost over time for sure. For me though, internet is kind of crap in my area and the work server gets a ton of access from coworkers. And my sister in another state watches movies and tv shows on my Plex. Both these server get over 1.2 gbps up and down. There is also no cost if I have a hardware failure. There are pros and cons for sure, like I’ve been wanting to do some stuff that could really benefit from a GPU but not really an option with the auction stuff.
Awesome. Yeah that would be one of my concerns for what I have now. My internet service is some pretty terrible residential internet so my upload speeds are absolute garbage here but I have some good hardware for Plex/jellyfin.
How’s transcoding on the hetzner server? Any issues there at all? In any case thanks for all the info!
99% of stuff worked fine, but when I had issues it was a random error about server being under powered which wasn’t true at all lol. Someone on a forum suggested using the official windows app from the store and once I moved to that for client side access, never got the error again.
Keep in mind though, if you plan to do Plex from Hetzner, after Oct 2nd it won’t work anymore. But others here have suggested JellyFin instead. I’ll be testing that out this weekend, and if all is good moving over from Plex all together.
Yeah I’ve been wanting to make the full jump to jellyfin anyway. The only thing holding me back really was some extra services I was using that were Plex only. Posterr for example, but jellyfin is on the roadmap and I can just roll my own version until then. The mobile clients have at least gotten pretty good as well for JF.
Well, good luck, and I hope if you try it out, Hetzner works out for you as well as it has for me.
Thanks! And again thank you for all the answers and advice!
What’s posterr?
It’s a self hosted application that displays the poster art from your media library to a digital sign, tv, or anything with a web browser. It connects to Radarr, Sonarr, and Plex to get the currently playing, releasing soon (and monitored) and your Plex library items.
See the project here: https://github.com/petersem/posterr
I don’t quite see the use case for this. Jellyfin shows poster art for your media. Or are you outputting to a different display than you are watching your media on?
I have a separate screen mounted to the wall that shows posters on rotation. It’s an android tablet essentially, but made for interactive store displays.