Agreed. I hadn’t quite put myself in the shoes of the Users. They are used to getting Plex for free and we the server Admins take on most of the costs (except the $5 mobile app fee) to get things really rolling.
However, even knowing it is a tough sell to Users, I think if they are families that really take their children’s innocence seriously, the Lifetime Membership could be seen as a good investment, especially when Plex offers its deals.
The one thing Plex, the company, can’t control is whether or not the shared server content that the User will be accessing makes the cost worth it. I think this might be the kicker that makes the decision for the User to invest or not.
See, we Admins see the cost decision mainly based on features that empower us to manage content. Users make decisions based on content itself and the ease-of-life features to access that content.
I have this issue as well. I share my library with family who have children as their managed users and I don’t think the posted workarounds are feasible in my situation.
What about adding a way to allow a server owner to add a share for managed users that don’t have their own separate account? I already have a share with the main account and I know the names for the managed users I’d like to share with, so there should hopefully be a way to link to the ID of the managed user.
Would that be a workable compromise to allow this functionality?
+1 for this option to show up, which my kids can see from my account anyway, but this way each of my kids can have a custom home screen.
For people who don’t like this idea, just don’t enable the “Allow this user to share this library with plex managed accounts” option and everyone will be happy!
One idea is that this option requires plex pass in the two affected accounts and thus promote the sale.
I, like many others, tried for a while to figure out how to share my friend’s libraries with my daughter’s managed account, only to find out it’s not actually possible. It seemed like an oversight. I thought it was annoying that they had made this obvious oversight, but gave my daughter access to my admin account so she could watch. My friend as the server owner was annoyed, since he had been excited at the prospect of sharing with my family.
It’s frequently painful to ask for feature requests from software developers. Some of them tend to get an almost zealot-like devotion to their own roadmap. I’ve experienced this from the inside, where the excuses for why someone else’s suggestion can’t be done get flimsier and flimsier.
Every supposed downside for why this can’t or shouldn’t be implemented is already happening.
The server owner didn’t give access to my daughter, they gave access to me, and should be allowed to control that - They already can’t control that. I just let my daughter watch on my account. The server owner has no ability to control this, so this wouldn’t change.
The server owner might not be tagging their content properly, so content controls will be useless - The way things are now, since my daughter has to use my admin account in order to access content at all, it is impossible to put ANY content controls on content shared from other servers. With the ability to share specific libraries with managed users, I could give access to servers I trust. As of now, my daughter has access to all servers and all content, since the current implementation has pushed her to use my admin account.
If I want to share a library between two families and have any amount of control over what my kids watch as a parent, the intended and purposeful design seems to be to create email accounts and real Plex accounts for my kids, and tell my friend to share their library with each of them. This is tedious for the server owner, and extremely tedious for me, and I lose the benefits of managed accounts.
So my options are:
Set up full Plex accounts for each of my kids, including setting up email addresses for some of them, losing the parental control benefits of managed accounts, and requiring my friend to manage those relationships.
or
Tell my whole household to use my account, and operate as if Plex doesn’t support multiple profiles.
I find it very strange that I as an admin user cannot give or revoke access to shared libraries to managed accounts, seeing that these accounts are part of my “main” account (these are not separate Plex users and should be able to access libraries shared by friends.
Whats the current status of this feature suggestion?
Sorry for replying to an almost ten year old post, but this seems crucial in reference to what most users here are trying to discuss (and fix.). If I interpret this correctly, managed users have…
And - again if I understand this correctly - that means I can teoretically, at least, share my library with someone else’s managed user. Right?
Ok well Maybe, but not like you could not program it display to the server admin as “Home Admin (Managed User)” or “Home Admin (Home User)”. Even add a little Icon to indicate which time of user it is.
You could:
Update the who’s watching what display to indicate it’s a Managed/Home user of an Invited Home Admin account. aka “Home Admin (Home users)” or something like that.
Add a Restrictions option in Mange Library Access to restrict sharing to one or the other type of home users, or to not allow sharing with the home at all.
Make the new restriction setting “Allow Home Admin to Share with Plex Home” Default to “Do not allow Plex Home Sharing”. Other options “Allow Plex Home Sharing”, and “Allow Only Managed Users.”
Make this a Plex Pass only feature for both the Sharing Server Admin, and the Receiving Home Admin.
Feature is only available when the Invited user is a Home Admin.
Definitions of user types as I am using them in my examples:
Server Admin: Server owner sharing a media library with another Plex User.
Home Admin: A Plex user receiving a share invite and the Admin of a Plex Home.
Managed Users: An account made in a Plex Home that does not have its own username and password for any plex service. To access they have to first be logged in with the account of the Home Admin or another Home User.
Home User: A Plex user that has been added to another Plex Admin’s home and is no longer a plex admin themselves.
How in the everliving heck is this still not a thing?! I figured I needed a Plex pass or something in order to control who has access to media libraries shared with the main user on the account.
Having different sub-users on your account is completely worthless as it stands right now, what a joke. Definitely not renewing plex pass. How has the developers not fixed this oversight in so many months of people asking for the feature.
It’s ridiculous that this feature doesn’t exist. As others have mentioned, this has no real impact on the shared server’s owner. They can already limit simultaneous streams if they choose to.
It does impact the recipient of the shared library though, because I can’t implement meaningful parental controls on my daughters account, I’m reliant on the server owner to do that. The workaround that exists via plex home is wholly unsatisfactory, because it does create an impact on the server owner, as they now have to share with multiple extra people AND manage the content settings, and it has an impact on me, because it creates the possibility for someone else to undermine me and my feelings, for example, if I only want G rated movies shared with my kid, but my brother thinks “eh, I’ll let her have PG too, because I let my kids watch PG movies”
Finally, it’s an absurd inconvenience for both me AND my friends who share their library. I share my library with about 8-10 friends, and have access to 5 different libraries of close friends. If we all tried to set up accounts to share to each other’s spouses and kids, we’d have 20+ shares instead of 5, and we’d have to join each other in troubleshooting if one kid lost access for some reason, which has happened at least 4-5 times among the few people I share with.
It’s a stupid, useless, and cumbersome way to accomplish something that should be quite simple. If plex really wants to make us do it this way, why not do away with managed users entirely, because they’re effectively useless as it stands.
I would really like this feature!
I have a few external users that have kids and didn’t realize that their managed accounts can’t access my shared libraries!
I’ve skimmed over some of the comments in this thread and a simple toggle allowing or denying external, managed users access to your shared libraries seems like a solid way to do this. Let the main external account manage what their home users have access to.
I know the Plex team is devoting more effort into their ad-supported side, but I don’t think a feature like this is too much to ask for, especially since users have been wanting it for almost a decade.
Yes this would be great! The option could read like “Allow external managed users access to this server if their home admin has access.” or something worded similar. What this would do is (by default be off) allow server owners to opt in to allowing users they share with to have their own managed users that have access to their server. Further granular control could be once the option is enabled it could also require that each shared user has to manually enable allowing managed users access to external libraries that are shared with them.
Example: Server Admin shares with friends A & B. User B has 3 family members that would like access. User B asks the admin to enable this feature which the admin does knowing that this will allow all managed users of their shared users access to their server. User B then creates 3 managed users for their spouse and 2 children.
Hi, this may or may not have been suggested in the thread, I did not read the whole thing.
If anyone is leveraging managed users to isolate the main/admin account, the simple solution/work around is to create a second plex account, invite that plex account into your home, then ask your friend to also invite your second account.
Then your home user has access to both YOUR home and the shared library of your friends.
This will allow you to keep your server admin restricted, whilst also giving a bit of flexibility with other shared servers/libraries and home users.
It may also seem obvious, but a PIN should be applied to any necessary home user to prevent any accidental switching to restricted profiles.
That’s exactly what we want to prevent. Because then I would have to invite 4 users from family A and 6 people from family B etc. So only accounts are wasted, because you can only invite 100. With large families like ours, I would then need 2-3 servers to cover all, not really practical if one would be enough if subaccounts per family would be possible. It’s also just about allowing home accounts, you can’t use them infinitely either way.
It must be possible for parents to create accounts for their children with the restrictions they want, which can then still access my database that the main account has. Otherwise, what’s the point of allowing multiple streams per account if they can’t distinguish and limit that for the people who want to watch?
In addition, the families also want to create different watch lists, etc., all otherwise not possible.
For me not understand why this is not possible. Disney+, Netflix and co. can do that all, recently even about foreign households, although with a surcharge but possible. But we are totally limited and have to waste accounts.
well, I suspect there is less than zero motivation for plex to implement something that will help extend or multiply the number of users shares available, which IMO is already very generous for ‘personal’ usage.
and for everyone else that isn’t close to the limit, the above suggestion should be sufficient.
Yes, one can certainly argue about the generosity, which is likely to be perceived differently from user to user and is also not the purpose of this request.
But since there is no chance at all, neither with a subscription, paid extensions or anything else to get more out for the server operators, it is certainly justified to ask for a viable solution. Because to waste and maintain 4-5 accounts per family, where then also the server operator must set the limits, etc., instead of the users who use them is simply not a solution in my eyes.
As I said, I would not mind paying for such features regularly, etc., but that you just do not offer anything, although there is a demand for over 100 users at least, I find just once more in connection with requests from users, that Plex ignores its users constantly and only includes what is important to you even if hardly anyone wants it or even uses it.
Plex is just lucky that none of the alternatives really does a better job and you as a user hardly have another/better choice.
It’s a pity that you don’t hear anything from the official side for years and that the users are left in the dark.
This is the argument against implementation that I can’t wrap my head around and no one in this thread has seemed to adequately explain. The request is to allow managed users to add shared libraries. Managed users. As in users who can not independently log in on their own.
My friend Max shared 4 libraries with me a couple of weeks ago. Just counting off the top of my head, I think I’m logged into 26 different apps/browsers across various platforms. About half of these are using managed users who, again, can not log in without my credentials. So from Max’s perspective, there are 26 devices which can end up playing content from his libraries. What I don’t understand is the argument that this is any kind of user amplification. How is it any different (from either a technical or conceptual perspective) if I use my main account across those 26 devices or if I select a managed user that I created specifically for other use cases (e.g. to maintain separate watch statuses or control library access)? If anything, Max might even want me to use managed users as that could potentially reduce access since I can just decide that one or two of my managed users won’t have his libraries added.
I have two libraries shared with my brother. As far as I’ve seen, he’s streamed stuff on 7 or 8 different devices. As a server owner, I couldn’t care less if he’s using his main account on those devices or if he has them split with managed users for his wife and 2 kids (my niece and nephew). He still has to log in with the user account that I shared the libraries to.
