Thank you Tom – I understand where you are coming from in terms of workaround – and it is appreciated.
In the use case above the easiest way for them to interface is via TV app which is where my perspective is coming from.
To extend on the idea a little bit further, let me share my current circumstances: my immediate family (i.e. wife & kids & I) are ‘stuck’ abroad in the Carribean, while our home server is in Canada. Netflix, Prime, Crave and the Bell subscription apps that we use for media are very heavily region-restricted (yes there is cat-and mouse VPN, proxy, geo spoof etc) but each service has some extent or another of geo-fencing or region-specific content change/reduction (i.e. one requires device location services to be on and even with a VPN (non-commercial but just to our home [using variety of open vpn, l2tp, sstp, pptp,ipsec protocols]) the GPS tips it off that we are out of region…) long-story short, our PLEX use has exploded!
To that end, I did begin to download our ‘film of the night’ during the middle of the day so we could reliably watch in the evening (as most of our media is either high quality family film or high fidelity (i.e. non-compressed from source) backups of our media collection) However with kids and other users in house that became impracticable, so I purchased a $100 used lenovo thinkcenter m73 (i.e. the caribbean scavenger’s version of a raspberry pi), an external drive and setup a local PMS, slowly but surely, I would field requests from my kids and wife for different content we have on our primary server and I eventually wrote some basic scripts to run a bandwidth-limited rsync queueing system.
Net-net, I can imagine a minority (though perhaps non-trivial amount) of plex users have either secondary locations or servers at a parent’s, friend’s etc who may not enjoy the same bandwidth as primary location and find that the installation of another PMS makes sense to keep some level of content (i.e. at a cottage or something of the like), perhaps it is not practicable to run a full duplication due to size/infrastructure costs, but they may benefit from a way of for example, subscribing to episodic content on the master server, and having each new episode sync, or perhaps sync a specific tag, or all content that is created between a certain period, or any variety of the amazing ways we can already label, and sort content on plex today. But perhaps they want it to sync during the week while they are in the city and have that content there when they get there over the weekend or whatever the case may be… (i.e. in the case of my mum who uses the TV app (and I installed an rPi server onprem – though to be clear, she is administered under my plex/pass and could hypothetically see content on our master server), it would be great if any time I backed up a piece of media that I tag as ‘Victorian period’ on the master server it would then sync it over to the server I have installed at her home), and likewise anything tagged ‘Animation’ would sync to the (hypothetical) cottage server etc… Thereby giving a new level of flexibility/ease of use that goes beyond having to make the choice of either transcoding down from the master server or pre-downloading a specific piece of content you know you want to watch in advance. I’m unfamiliar with the PLEX dev community but would be willing to look into contributing this on my own or hand in hand with an established member of the community as I can imagine that a use case along these lines may not be that uncommon…
…further down this path, I can imagine a further extension where two seperate Plex Pass ecosystems/families/friends/groups may wish to connect/bridge/share their libraries not just as a admin/user relationship, but two admins sharing eachother’s contents with their users or otherwise just allow the admins to view/share/sync content across ecosystems but perhaps set limits of folders, tags, bandwidth, time of the days etc)… i.e. we have a great french family next door with old french content on their pms that they would like to share and they may like my wife’s short films, instead of becoming a user of each other’s servers we would just like to be able to share a certain tag/language within our library and let any of our users/family members access that content and I would as an admin like to review the content on the ‘french’ server and chose to perhaps sync all of a specific auteur to our pms master server or caribbean server or both.
