[Feaure Request] Allow Plex Home users to view Shared Content

Feature Suggestions
1

I don't see why managed plex home users can't view content that is shared with the primary plex home user?  I would like to create managed home accounts for my non-tech family members, but they can only see my content.  Wthout being able to view content that is shared with me it's almost useless.  I have to let everyone use my account to get the full library.  Until this is fixed I don't see the Plex Home user accounts as very useful. 

 

I understand the content restriction and labels for the accounts is great, and I think it's a good step forward.  However we need to allow shared content to be viewed by managed users to fully make tis work. 

2

This is as intended.  The person that shared their library with you, shared it with YOU and not any Tom, Dick or Harry you added to your Home.

We have people right now asking to eliminate the 15 Managed User limits so they can get the "feel" of the main account on all of their users.  Imagine what the impact to your friend's server would be, if you had 30 in your Managed Users Home listing and all 30 hit your friend's server at the same time?  Soon, you don't have that person sharing with you any more.  I personally think having 15 is a bit too high...  How many of us live in a home with 15 people in it?

If your friend shares with your users, then they get to see the content.  Yes, this requires each user to have a Plex.tv account.  No, they won't be able to be on his Home.  (Can only be in one Home at a time.)  Yes, they get to stream his content and your content.

Just because I share with you doesn't mean I want to share with your cousin's uncle's niece's son in Timbuktu...

3

The point if Plex Home is to allow the creation of managed users and allow the accounts you add to your plex home to benefit from your plexpass subscription (access to certain apps and features for free).  

It isn't, as @Mike G. pointed out, to allow you to re-share a shared server.

4

I understand your point, but how is it different than if I just use my account on everyone's device?  This is what I have to do now to make it work. 

The difference is that I only have 2-3 family members I will use this for, and only share libraries with about 5 people.  The total size of the group won't exceed anyone's server capacity.  I just want everyone to see everything. 

If this is enabled and people abuse it then they will get blocked/unshared.  I don't think the software should decide how I use it, let the users decide that. 

5

I understand your point, but how is it different than if I just use my account on everyone's device?  This is what I have to do now to make it work. 

For me, if you handed out your account info to your entire family and I saw multiple simultaneous streams coming from your acount I would no longer be sharing with you.  As I chose to share with you not your entire family. 

If this is enabled and people abuse it then they will get blocked/unshared.  I don't think the software should decide how I use it, let the users decide that. 

It is letting the user decide, it's letting the user that is creating the share decide who they want to share with on a per user basis.

6

It's just annoying if I want to add someone, I have to contact everyone who shares with me and then request they now share with my father-in-law.  He has no clue how to do the request.  Then if I add my brother I have to again, ask everyone to share with that person. 

I haven't actually rolled it out to family members because I was hoping this would get changed. It sounds like it won't, and I'll just have use my account. 

I understand from a scalling perspective if you are sharing with a large number of people, or have a large server.  For me it's a simple way to access my DVD content and share it with a few friends, not scale it and replace my tv service. 

7

I understand your point, but how is it different than if I just use my account on everyone's device?  This is what I have to do now to make it work. 

The difference is that I only have 2-3 family members I will use this for, and only share libraries with about 5 people.  The total size of the group won't exceed anyone's server capacity.  I just want everyone to see everything. 

If this is enabled and people abuse it then they will get blocked/unshared.  I don't think the software should decide how I use it, let the users decide that. 

If I knew you were doing something like this and I was sharing, I wouldn't be right after I found out.  Even 2-3 people could bring a smallish server to it's knees, unless they are running the right clients, and time frames, with everything set up to support the media I have on my server, and my bandwidth.

Plain and simple...  IMHO this abuses the friend's machine and connection he is sharing with you and the trust he has placed in you allowing you to share his media.  If you want to get his media on your server, buy the movie/show and then your users can stream it.  Handing out your log in information is just as bad, and I wouldn't tolerate it on anything I share out.

8

To tell you the truth I would love to have this feature but for a different reason.  I would love to have the ability to setup a share with "pass through sharing" that is configurable per user.  Why I would like this:

Imagine being able to setup a 2nd or 3rd plex server in your own environment depending on load.  For example one machine with movies pre 2010 and another with movies 2010 to current.  A 3rd machine with TV shows that have ended, ect. You setup each of these tertiary machines to share with your main account.  Now on your main server you can centrally control your users and shared libraries (on that machine or other machine) and all stats and watched status funnels through the main machine.  In affect a "network or distributed Plex server that act as one bigger server. This would allow one version of PlexWatch to be used, etc.  This could be very powerful used in the right hands.

What I would NOT LIKE is for a 3rd party to be able to re-share my libraries without my permission. Imagine having a setup that can only stream to 3 or 4 people at the same time (CPU or bandwidth constrained).  You ONLY share with 3 people to make sure your resources don't get exhausted only to find out each of those 3 people also re-shared your libraries with 3 or 4 other people.  Their intention might be good in that they "only" shared with 3 other people but the combined affect of this could easily bring down most Plex servers quickly.

My tagline used to read "sharing with 40+ people" up to a couple of days ago.  Guess what, I just re-installed PlexWatch after a server rebuild (hadn't been running it for 2 months) and it quickly came to my attention how many of my "friends" were actually sharing their accounts with other people. I knew some were doing it as I'd sometimes see the same person viewing two movies at the same time, but after reviewing the logs and seeing how many different IPs were being used by the same users in different geographic locations...   This list of "friends" I'm now sharing with is more like 10-15 now.  I even suspended my daughter (for a couple of days) who "gave access" to her boyfriend and a couple of close friends. 

Carlo

9

Carlo, I see your use case being something much different than the OP's request was.  You are asking for a distributed pool of Plex Servers, all funneling through a common master server.

in this situation, servers are shared to servers, not servers to users.  The master server still would control the main shares of all of the distributed servers, and the user base would be a common user base.  These distributed servers would be linked at a server level, not at an account level.  Since the "main server" maintains the list and pushes this out to the other servers it would allow some fail safe.  One or more servers go down, the list is still held and can be pushed out.

The more I think on this aspect, the more I'm thinking the idea of servers shared to servers, with one server maintaining the master list, but the shared servers doing the actual streaming might be a way to set up this distributed system. The users validate against the main server, and not against a locally (to the server) maintained list.  the main server could even maintain a listing all of llibraries, and hand off the actual streaming to the secondary server when the request for the stream comes through.

This would make Plex a fully distributed networked system.  Before something like this could come along, though, we need tools and controls...  We would need the way to limit bandwidth, transcoding, concurrent users, etc...

10

Yep.  Notice the pattern you and I often speak off.  Server tools, server tools, server tools.   :)

This is only one way of many ways that some sort of distributed server setup could be done.

Another possible easier way to scale is simply to allow distributed encoding using other machines on the same network.

An of course maybe the best way is to replace sqllite with a true multiuser data such as MySQL.

With this last route we could have multiple Plex servers using the same central database and pointed to the same meta-data.  All watched status and sync data is maintained perfected since it's all kept in the same place. This would actually be the most ideal way and would give us a lot of additional freedom.  With a central database that we can access while running we could have all kinds of new tools to do things!

Everything from Trakt type plugins that could sync for each and every different user to being able to replicate setting offsite to being able to copy playlists you create for other users (think recommended movies) to whatever would lend itself to direct db manipulation.  No longer would all 3rd parties have to go through the Plex API to get things done.  Want a fast export to CSV or a way to pull the last 2 episodes of each tv show and the last 10 movies added to display on your website, easy.  

I better stop before I get myself to excited with the possibilities and then get depressed cause I can't do any of it yet.  :)

11

What needs to be done, is in the User section of Plex where you can managed what is shared to your local plex users and your shared users, they just need to add a check box(which by default is unchecked) to allow your content to be shared to the local users of plex user you are sharing with. This will allow the host total control of whether he/she wants to share their library with more then just the initial friend/plex user. If can I choose who can access my library then it is my responsibility if it has a negative affect on my cpu load or plex server, and if it does I can always un-check the box / reload the server making my content unavailable to those local users or even my friend all together. Should this be added to plex? Yes - Can people abuse it? Yes, but if the access control is with the host then access can be changed or removed.

12

Let me ask you a question that I don’t know if you have thought through regarding this. Right now, in Plex we can have a total of 100 “friends” and I honestly don’t know if the 15 Managed Users count against this 100 or not, but let’s say it doesn’t for the sake of discussion… (Although we know having a second server and sharing out to the same 10 users as the first actually means a total of 20 shares against your 100 total, at least as far as using a Cloud Server has been explained. The 100 users is tied to the Plex Pass account and not the server that those friends have access to! This was put in place to prevent people from “selling” or “renting” their shares out to people)

So, you have a friend you share with. He is one of say 10 people you share your media with. And he has 10 managed users on his server. You turn on this feature for his account, would his 10 friends, plus his account count against your Managed Users? Or would those 10 additional accounts he is sharing your content out to counting against your 100 friends? If this option, then you now have 20 shared friends, not just 10. If it’s the previous option, where it’s against your Managed Users, then you just lost 10 of your own Managed Users, just by sharing out to him.

The question is then, do his managed users count against your totals at all? I think if you intend to share in this manner, that they should count in some manner. What we wind up with is someone setting up 4 or 5 servers with different accounts, and basically daisy chaining them all together so you can get 45-60 “managed users” all sharing and all tied together. And now it is starting to look a lot more like a commercial venture instead of a not-for-profit hobby.

And don’t get me wrong… I personally feel we should be able to have as many friends as we want to share with. This arbitrary 100 users max, and it counts for all servers, including Cloud seems extremely limiting. (Imagine for @cayars example above, 4 servers, each also with Cloud Sync, so that now counts as 8 servers total, that means a max of 12 friends shared with total?) Although most of us might be hard pressed to have more than 20 or 25 friends we share with…

But Managed Users need to be more restrictive. Managed Users can only access via the local network, for instance. Or if accessing remotely, they need to have been validated locally at least once in a certain time period. (Say once a week?)

This is an interesting thought provoking topic, in any case…

For @cayars idea above, if I share a server to another server, does the second server’s friends list count against the 100 just as the shared friends on the first server do? As it stands now, yes. It counts because the account used to register the server has the limit, not the server itself. Should it? This is open to debate, I guess.

And to answer your question: “Should this be added to Plex?” I’m still going to answer a resounding “NO!” At least not until some of the points above are addressed/clarified, so we know exactly the full ramifications of this sharing of shared affects each admin’s friends lists. I might be swayed a bit towards this, if the user limits were something larger than the 100 number they sit at now.

13

Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate