Plex Cloud shutting down

[One2Go 120]

I really appreciate your inside and knowledge on this matter and I realize I am standing at a cross road. Some of your reasons for switching are not compelling for me as I have at the moment 4 users they are each in a different time zone. UK, Italy, Ghana, Canada (BC) and of course me EST. My movie and TV cloud library is small and I only post requests plus what I feel may be of interest to them. Scanning content was not an issue for me. I tried to install Emby on a QNAP NAS and had issues that were discussed here and finally abandoned it and installed the Emby server on Win 7 client machine for my Home Theater that uses content from my 2 local servers with some 40TB and I do love the usage of Emby for WMC because of the Throgsoft themes. So I am set and don't use Plex unless I travel.

 

I also have 2 lifetime subscriptions and purely use Plex for the 4 users I share cloud storage with. I have an Office 265 subscription so that allows me to have 1TB for TV shows and 1TB for movies. Since then I did contemplate going the Google route because of the ease of use but I now need to consider encryption which I have not done with Onedrive for the  past 4 years. However the over riding decision for me is I don't want to migrate the users and now need to provide tech support for total Newbs.

 

You are correct that somehow I have to start from scratch again. The change would be made easier if the VPS with SSDNodes does not have the transcoding restriction, but it seems other providers will follow that path. This is in their TOC.

 

Multimedia Transcoding: ​The use of multimedia transcoding applications is in direct violation of this AUP and shall trigger the Methods of Resolution under this AUP as set forth below in Table C. This includes, but is not limited to Plex.

 

The way I read that is, that if your application actually does some transcoding then yes it is in direct violation of their AUP, however if it does not transcode then you have not violated the agreement. Just because an application is capable of some function that are not being allowed does not mean the other legal functions can’t be used and it is no reason for banning the application or closing the account.

 

In any occasion for the next 3 years I have signed up with SSDNodes having a KVM X-Large+ server that has the following:

CPU-4
Memory 24.00 GB
SSD 120.00 GB
Transfer 12TB

 

Should just alone the installation of Plex lead to a resolution and termination of my contract with SSDNodes then I will look for a different solution again.

[Carlo 4560]

So you have about 40 TB of storage at home and already run an Emby server or two?

 

Why the need to run a cloud version for 4 users?  Do you have very limited upload bandwidth?

Are these heavy users or casual?

What formats do you keep your media in and does this media normally direct play for your clients or does it need transcoding?

 

Sorry for all the questions but this helps to figure out a solution that meets your needs.

[One2Go 120]

I run 1 Emby server at home exclusively for my Home Theater and the content is on UnRaid servers plus the Emby server is on a NUC. All get powered on when wanting to be used.

 

The 4 users are casual users and I do have 83Mbps down and 93Mbps up, however the NAS I have is a QNAP TS-253Pro which could handle perhaps two users as it also handles all my Usenet & P2P traffic.

 

My content is all in containers and formats that will allow Direct Play / Stream which I have tested with a Roku client.

 

I only make a very limited collection available to those users and often I have on my UnRaid servers a version of the media that can't be streamed directly. So i basically have sometimes one version for the cloud storage and one for the local network.

 

I just felt comfortable with offloading the work to a cloud server. I paid for the VPS $360 for 3 years which is worth it if it reduces stress and hassle plus saves some time. If you want to play you have to pay.

 

Thanks for helping to get a clear picture on providing playback to users in other parts of the world. Also I also don't relish the idea of pulling down content from the cloud only to push it back up to a user.