I often find myself wanting to show a friend or family a specific show, to get them hooked or see if they like it. It takes time to walk them through the whole handshake of adding them to my account, having them create a Plex account, and showing them how to navigate to the right place, and when their attention span is limited this can be a deal-breaker. This feature request offers an alternative.
Plex would allow me to generate a URL to a specific piece of media in my account. The link would include an authenticated token (query parameter?) managed by my server, that my server can validate when the link is used to access the desktop viewer: https://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/server/.....?auth_token=ABCDEF
The token would include a lifetime (1 day, maybe variable) on generation, and the access will be invalidated after that time.
I would generate the link by navigating to the media that I wanted to share, clicking a Generate Shareable Link button, selecting a time window, and then copying the result to my clipboard.
URL accesses that include the token would not be required to log into Plex accounts, and would be granted (or denied) access at the will of my server, which would validate that the link is both valid and not expired.
The scheme is similar to Signed URLs implemented by Google Cloud Storage.
