The “Plex Home” configuration for multiple household users is awesome! and I love it!
However, I have come across a conundrum for which Plex Home has not solved. consider this a feature request. though I do have a manual workaround (it requires a little work, but it works well so far)
This issue and solution are NOT for everyone… or even most users, and I have a working solution for which I’m happy with. I just thought I would throw it out there and see if anyone would bite.
You see me and my husband have very different tastes in what shows we like to watch. that is NOT to say that we don’t like some of the same shows, but for the most part, we have have different tastes when it comes to the shows we watch. (he likes history shows, political shows… and for some reason Ancient Aliens. I’m more of a science fiction, police procedurals and I cannot stand to see (or hear) the guy with the frizzy hair on Ancient Alians)
Originally, I placed all of our shows in one big master library. As that library grew our home screens and the master library started to get. hrm, messy…
You see, we would spend a lot of time logging into your particular home account and marking shows as “watched” because we didn’t want to see them anymore.
well, there’s a simple solution! right? (hrm… )
Solution #1…
create two libraries, one for me and one for him. put my shows in my library and put his shows in his.
oops, Delima… There are shows that we both liked remember!
easy fix, create a third library to put the shows we both enjoy in that library.
This worked for the most part.
Alas, eventually he would fall out of favor one show, or I would fall out of favor of another. now I have to ship the show files/folders around to another library and do a rescan, blah blah blah.
now, consider if you had 3 family members. Now you have libraries for Person A, Person B, Person C, Person AB, Person BC, Person AC, and finally Person ABC. (a lot of folders for just one more person) I don’t even wanna think about 4+ persons…
It took me a while, but I found a solution (Trust me, the plex database is NOT a huge fan of this, but it works)
NOTE: I’m a Linux guy. but my understanding is that this solution may work for later versions of windows server. whatever supports symlinks
Solution #2
go back to one big happy library for all the shows, we shall call this the “catalog”
now, create a user folder “USER” under which you create a folder for each user; “Person A”, “Person B”, “Person C” etc.
now, just symlink each individual show’s parent folder from master “catalog” into the various user’s folder. in plex, create libraries for each user pointing to their users’ folder. Administer the user and attach each user library with that specific user…
in my case, I added the “catalog” library to each user as well, but disabled it from the dashboard, this accomplishes 2 things; allows the user to see all of the shows in the library, and maintains watch counts if a show is unsubscribed and resubscribed later for that user)
to do the subscribing and unsubscribing, I wrote some scripts (and an IOS shortcut!) and all is now working very smoothly.
obviously, this creates a LOT of duplication in the plex database, so far it seems to have handled it but eats up a LOT of space depending on how big your master library is and how many users/shows are subscribed.
in summary, the FEATURE REQUEST!
What would be a nice feature… would be for this to be built into plex… my suggested implementation is something along the lines of (but not limited to).
- when you create a library you can mark it as a “catalog” library, then add that library to each user.
- each home user gets an equivalent ‘virtual’ private library to any defined “catalog” libraries.
the user logs into their plex home account for the first time, they would see no shows on their dashboard by default. they could simply go to the catalog library, and click and mark shows they want to “subscribe” to and it would be added to the users “virtual” library. similarly, they could unsubscribe to a show in their virtual library and it would be removed from their dashboard…
and I’m sure this would be much more database friendly than my solution.
