[Feature Request] Share Links for Media

TL;DR - The ability to share media content by generating a link to selected content that I can give to anyone. They can then use said link to immediately view content without having to have a sign into a Plex account.

To share content now:

1. Share Person - Have them sign up for a Plex account
2. Share Person - Have them open the email address and verify the email is good
3. Myself - Get their username or know the email that they used
4. Myself - Share the correct media folder to them
5. Share Person - Have them navigate to the: http://plex.tv/web/app site
6. Share Person - Open my folder/server and navigate to the correct media
7. Share Person - Play the media

To share content in "the future":

1. Myself - Select the media I want to share
2. Myself - Post generated link
3. Share Person - Click the link and enjoy!

Right now, there is a pretty steep barrier to start using Plex. I often have a song that I want to share while chatting in IRC but most people don't have a Plex account so I usually have to find another way to share the media. The idea might be to only allow people with accounts to view content but I think that overall we can attract more people to use Plex if the initial barrier is lower.

Stretch Goals:

1. Set restrictions on how long the link is usable
   1. Time Limit
   2. Number of plays
   3. Unique Views
2. Optionally set a simple password for the link in order to view it
3. Ability to bundle different media together for a link
   1. 1 TV episode
   2. 1 TV episode, 1 movie
   3. 1 TV episode, 1 movie, 3 songs
   4. 1 TV episode, 1 movie, 3 songs, 1 photo album
   5. 1 TV series, 3 movies, 1 song album, 2 photos
4. Ability to name the content of the link
   1. Saturday Night Movie Night Extravaganza!
   2. Family Vacation 2014 - Grand Canyon
5. A way to signup for an actual Plex account right on the generated page
   1. Computer savy -> Sign up
   2. Not Computer savy -> Enjoy media hassle free! (This would be awesome for my grandma <3 )
6. Share particular media with interval
   1. Song - [1:38 - End] - That final drum solo...
   2. TV Show - [5:38 - 9:45] - Awesome fight scene!

--> To vote for this feature simply like this post. Thanks! <---

--> P.S. Leave feedback if you have any! (Don't want to get buried) ^_^ <---

awesome idea...

those links could even then be fed back into features like the movie post play i guess :)

I did request this as well. As an example, subsonic has this features existing.
It is possible to share medias with outsiders that will then have a temporary access (configurable in days) through the guest account.
It is also possible to see how many times the file / media was accessed / played.

I hope this will come very soon.

Feel free to use the screenshot I mocked up in my thread here: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1017008#Comment_1017008

Was thinking about this today, I think it would be a great feature! Generate link, send, enjoy!

The other way to share works, but sometimes you don’t want to share a whole library (or make a custom one for a single user).

1. Myself - Select the media I want to share
2. Myself - Post generated HTTP link
3. Share Person - Click the link and enjoy!

It would be the best feature ever made! When I want to watch a video with another player like Daum PotPlayer or VLC, I’ll be then able to generate an HTTP URL for a video, and then paste it on VLC or Daum PotPlayer, and then watch it! 3D support is really bad on Plex Media Player: I’ll be able to use another player like Daum PotPlayer to watch 3D content of my Plex Media Server.

any advancement on this ?

Great idea. I’d honestly like to just share a link of a movie or song to my friends and that link open the movie or song on their plex app

Yes, we NEED a way to share a photo or video content just like BOX or GOOGLE DRIVE. I find myself having to upload onsey twosey files to those other services so I can share a single file with our family or social media.

Permissions should follow the same model as Drive or Box.

+1 for something like this as well. Sharing Home Videos is two-step process for me: 1) Saved to PLEX and 2) Uploaded elsewhere (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) for easy sharing.

Great idea. I would also love to see something like expiration for links, so you can share something for an hour or so.

This would be brilliant. A generated link, that we email - when clicked they get access to the web based player. We can set expiry period during link creation…

Can be nice. But it HAS to be limited in some way.

I was looking to add this as a request and found it already requested. I think of google docs, any doc you can select an option to offer a shareable link. no log in required. would love to see this in plex, or even in plex pass.

(edit) it occurs to me the big difference is google docs is a hosted solution. but still, if i can share a log in to a ‘friend’ i should be able to add an unauthenticated user to access certain i am serving locally. I want to email or text a link to a video and have the link work without a log in.

please and thank you…

I wrote up a similar request before searching and finding this one. In addition to Like-ing the OP, I’m going to add the write-up I had made, since it discusses a particular use case (rabb.it) that I suspect will be growing in demand.

[I’ll describe this in reference to rabb.it, since that is what got me thinking about it, but I expect people would find the feature useful in other ways.]

rabb.it seems like a fun and useful way for folks to watch a show together. It takes care of all the hassle of keeping the viewers synced and allowing them to chat together (as desired), etc.

It’s possible to use it with your Plex server. When you host a room you can get to a web browser in a virtual space that you can point at your plex server, but then you have to authenticate with your plex username and password to access it. I am not comfortable exposing that to the browser in another service’s virtual environment. Given that there is not a convenient alternative way to access your plex media, however, I would not be surprised to find that a number of rabb.it users already using Plex username/passwords in that way.

To address this, Plex apps could provide a way for a plex user to generate a temporary token link that would provide access to a given TV show (or, perhaps, just an individual episode, but I could see how that could become very tedious if you wanted to watch more than one).

In other words, outside of rabb.it they would authenticate as normal to the plex web app, for example, and use that to generate a token URL for the resource they wanted to watch. When they are in the rabb.it browser they would enter that URL, and it take them right to the resource without having to expose their username/password to the rabb.it broswer.

The access granted would be limited to playing the resources which were specified when the token URL was generated. In addition to specifying what it would access, they should also be able to specify how it will be expired.

It might make the most sense to add a “Get temporary watch link” option to the “More…” menu for TV shows, seasons, and episodes, since that would effectively allow a user to ‘specify’ the scope of access the URL would allow, according to their choice of where they generated it. It could pop up a dialog with the URL and the options for expiration (with some reasonable default preselected?). That would make the feature pretty easy to use, I would think.

It would be acceptable, imo, to make this a feature only available on a PlexPass user’s server, provided that link generation ability would be available to any plex user (be they PlexPass or no) using that server. Folks might prefer to have an option in the Friends list user/server settings (the same place where you specify what libraries that user can access) to manage access to the feature, maybe. I think I am okay with any Friend of my server getting the ability, myself, but if I had to click an option to enable it for a user (much like I have to go in to set the list of libraries already), that would be fine, too.

Bonus points: have an option to get a url.plex.tv/ tinyurl-style short version of the token URL, so simplify typing into the rabb.it browser. If you chose to make the basic token URL support available to all, perhaps this tinyurl-type plex.tv link idea could be a PlexPass-only additional feature?

I am desperately wishing for this feature, although a new access control model needn’t (and shouldn’t) be introduced. I’d just love to be able to share direct links to content with a user that already has a Plex account and access to my content. Basically, a straightforward implementation like Spotify’s, where a link is produced that points to the content on my server. If the link recipient doesn’t have a Plex account/permission to access to the content, well, they aren’t allowed to access it.

This would be fairly straightforward to implement, and it would leverage built-in content access control, but it would open Plex up to a lot of additional users. My friends and I share Spotify links all day long, but to share specific content on a Plex server, people are required to open the app and browse around to find it. It’s not the worst situation in the world, but it is a barrier to supporting conversation/community around shared content.

duplicate feature request

closing

Please respect the rules for this subforum

• Search first if the request has already been posted before. The goal is to collect the votes for a particular feature in one thread - not to scatter them around.
• Please only one feature per post