So my wife and I are going “live” with our plex server and I want to give the kids access. They all have iPhones and laptops in their rooms. Initially I wanted them to connect locally, so I tried to add local home account. I then went to their computers and went to the http://192.168.1.xx:32400 address and it said they needed to log in with a plex account. I was hoping they wouldn’t have to create a plex account. This was so that I could limit their consumption to in the house, not when at friends house, etc. and not subject to them sharing their login and suddenly I’m feeding the neighborhood video through my internet connection.
Anyway, she did make an account and I shared it with her that way but she can now go to app.plex.tv/web and share her login with anyone and I’d rather not have that. I’d like to keep it to the local subnet (for her). I of course as master and commander of this fair household would like to maintain my web access
Long story short, is there a way to just give them access to the local address, and have them use the home account and not need a Plex account? I’ve secured my account with a PIN now as I don’t want them to have delete/config change ability. I know easy web access is a big plus of Plex, but in this case I want to limit it. How are you guys doing this? Thanks.
Works well for me. My young fella is 5 we got him an ipod touch which has restricted access to everything but the Plex app. Within plex he is a managed user and only share kids audiobooks and kids music.
By enabling local sync for his account if we’re going away we can sync a few audio books to his ipod.
I see what you’re trying to do and I can’t think of a good way to limit local versus remote connections based on account. I certainly don’t think you can get there from Plex home. That being said, one of the advantages of home is that you’re not opening the server up to other accounts. The software is installed on the clients with the primary account username and password, but from there the user chooses their icon to access things. The point is, if you control the installing of the app for the kids, they only choose their icon and can’t share their access with friends. The server is actually only accepting connections from one account. The other advantage is to specify libraries per user and rating levels.
Actually, there is a way to do this coming, we hope. We recently got Stream Limits that are, for now, globally applied. but what we asked for is a per user limit. The release notes for the limits we did get said that the feature is not complete yet. We also hope to soon get a limit to concurrent users per account. This would take care of your concerns 100%.
So, what we hope for is that we get a per user limitation. In this case, you could set a limit of something particularly low for the kids when streaming remotely to prevent huge bandwidth usage.
For what it’s worth, you can also install PlexPy, a really great add on originally written by @drzoidberg33 and later @JonnyWong16 took up the reigns. This can be set up to notify you of more than one connection your users have active at a time. And then you can remove the sharing or change the password, or whatever, to eliminate the problem.
So your son has shared his logon with a friend, the friend starts something at his home, your son starts his on his tablet. You get notified, log into the Web App, disable the account, then have some stern words with the son about accounts and security. Then re-enable the account, and sit back for a while until the daughter does it. Rinse/Repeat.
While PlexPy doesn’t fix the problem you are worried about, it does give you the ability to exercise some control over the behavior.
Yes limiting their remote access is what I want to do, local I’m okay with. By them having a plex app which is “unrestricted” aside from the restrictions I can place on content, they could in theory share their login info (and certainly likely). I will keep a track of the devices connecting if I see them run up I’ll just remove them and say “no TV you lost that privilege”
Now with regards to using Home and installing the app on their phone/PC/etc. and having them log in that way - so I would have to enter my login credentials to authorize the app, then they would click on their account and enter their PIN? Is that what I’m seeing? Is there any downside to this? I can see if I do this through in their browser they would then be authorized to post on the forums which I wouldn’t be too keen on, not sure what else might be affected. I noticed too after I turned home on when I went to Plex on my iPhone it didn’t ask me for a PIN. Is that because I’m the master account? I was hoping home would allow them to connect to the local IP and select a home account and go.
Just take their devices and sign them in to your Plex Home yourself. That way they never get to see your password - and thus are not able to login per plex web or post in the forums.
@JBinFla said:
Okay, so they won’t be able to take that “signed in” app and go to the forum, etc.? Thanks.
If that app happens to be a web browser, they might. So avoid authenticating Plex web on their laptops and steer them to OpenPHT or PMP or the Windows UWP app instead.
@OttoKerner said:
Just take their devices and sign them in to your Plex Home yourself. That way they never get to see your password - and thus are not able to login per plex web or post in the forums.
This is also what I do. I have 3 kids spanning 4 years. They all have Plex IOS apps on their phones and iPads, and Roku TVs in their room. I created their own accounts and signed them in, and I only had to sign them in once. I don’t mind if they access our PMS remotely though, but they don’t know the password so they can’t give it out.
My younger 2 have access to G, and PG movies, and TV-G, and TV-PG TV Shows. My older one I allow PG-13 movies and TV-14 TV Shows. I use labels to accomplish this, not MPAA ratings. Restricting by MPAA ratings does work, but give much less control. For example I wanted to give my younger kids access to Iron Man (PG-13) but not Gremlins (PG).
Now you do have to 1.) go through all movies and label them. I selected all G and labeled them G. Then I selected all PG movies and gave them a PG label. Then I went back to the PG movies before 1985 (before PG-13 rating was used) and reviewed them individually. I labeled all PG-13 movies PG-13 then went to select ones and labeled them PG so my younger kids would have access. Labeled all R rated movies R, etc. You get the idea. It was quite a pain but it doesn’t take long and once it’s done it’s done.
Then 2.) when you add a movie you have to label it, and if you add a new TV show you have to label it (not every episode, just the TV show itself).
This works great for me, so maybe it will help someone.
I’ve done something similar with labels except I created a label for my son, lets say “Bob”. So if I want my son to have access to a specific movie or tv show (regardless of the rating) I just add his “Bob” label to the sharing label list for that item. For his account under sharing, I have his “Bob” label listed under restrictions so he only sees items with his label name.
I only have the one kid, but I think it would be easily applied to larger families.
