Are there any plans to facilitate inviting non-technical people to Plex? We share our family videos and photos with grandmom on plex, but just installing the thing is beyond her, let alone registering a user on plex.tv.
It would be really nice to just add family members, maybe with their email address, and then just tell them to get a player and use that email player to start watching the content. Just like for managed users, but remotely.
I know it’s not there now, but the experience and trying to explain to gran that she doesen’t have to pay for plex is… challenging, especially over the phone (we live half a country aphart.
@Coxeroni said:
You could buy her a client, set it up and send it to her. She would only need to wire it.
Yeah, I could, but my post was more about avoiding that, maybe as a feature request, to be able to add a “managed remote user” of sorts for my family subscription, so they don’t have to download & install an app, and then go to a website to register (btw iOS registration is broken, the password doesen’t get saved)
The whole thing would be a bit insecure for my liking, but you could register an account for her, no? Where is the difference then? She just needs to enter user and pass instead of e-mail.
Managed users can be used remotely. Basically you’d need to add a home user for her in your account, and then she’d log in and use that.
But that means you’re sharing your credentials with her.
You could also create her an account myself, perhaps with a random email address she’ll never hear of again, and give her the credentials to use to access it.
If both methods are too complicated for her, honestly I don’t think Plex can do anything about it. Some elderly people are just not tech savvy for today’s world… Buy her a cheap Roku, log in with your credentials under a home user you created for her and mail her the device.
Thanks for your replies.
I understand the workarounds you’re giving me, and appreciate them, however
I think I’ll stick to my wanting this as a feature request for future users.
Right now, you have to:
Navigate to plex.tv and register as a user (and so far, everyone non-technical has ended up installing a server!)
Wait for an email that more than likely will be filtered into the trash-email.
Click the link in the email to activate the registration
Now that they have a user, you can invite them to your plex server
Now they can install the plex app on their iPad or whatever device they have and sign in to it
**What I’d like to see is: **
You invite a remote family member by email, using one of their oAuth 2.0 email addresses (gMAil, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, etc). You also fill in name, Surname, and possibly add an icon/image of their user beforehand.
This creates a managed plex user on your server/with Plex
In the email that they receive, a message says that they have been included in your family plex pass membership. Perhaps containing a personalized message. “Click this link to download Plex” downloads Plex onto their device, and immediately adds your server to it.
Once they open Plex, they sign in to their oAuth account, and see your server and media right away
This should be doable, and would make Plex Pass THAT much more cool for families.
Some of your What I’d like to see is assumes the user is already logged into some online account(google,apple, maybe windows store for win10 stuff)
Installing Plex is about as hard as connecting to those sites.
@NewPlaza - I disagree fully.
Setting up an email account with google, apple, windows etc is difficult for non-tech savvy people, like grandmoms and old uncles. I have 3 old people in my family that have no idea whatsoever what their password is for their email accounts. Even the concept of “password” is hard for them to grock.
Setting up Plex requires you to FIRST register as a plex user on plex.tv, THEN check your email (and plex email tends to fall into the spam/trash folder due to it’s activation link), and once that is done, you have to send your username to me so I can add you as a friend. THEN you have to download & install plex player on your device, sign in, and choose your user. If you sign in on a iPad, you also have to figure out that “xxx’s iPad” is not the plex server you want, but the one I have.
Good luck in explaining all of that to a remote old family-member over the phone.
If I could invite them using an existing email, I could get by with telling them to look in the spam folder. The registration/accept link should include a download-link for the device, with the user already set up and pointing to my plex server. Still a challenge, but FAR less so than how it works today.
My Grandmother, 83 years old, uses Plex with no issues. She also accesses Facebook and Gmail with no issues and believe me when i say shes non-tech savvy. Just saying =P
The ‘difficult’ part of Plex is setting up and managing the server and the associated networking.
The end user and client side is about as simple as it gets. Dumbing it down any more will make it insecure.
As already has been said why not setup an email digitaldias.plex@gmail.com with a password and link it to your Plex account. Then you can hand out the one email to anyone in your family with the same password.
The only downside is for tracking what’s watched everything that is viewed would be marked as watched. If this is a problem just setup emails for each user.
@umiq88 said:
The ‘difficult’ part of Plex is setting up and managing the server and the associated networking.
The end user and client side is about as simple as it gets. Dumbing it down any more will make it insecure.
As already has been said why not setup an email digitaldias.plex@gmail.com with a password and link it to your Plex account. Then you can hand out the one email to anyone in your family with the same password.
The only downside is for tracking what’s watched everything that is viewed would be marked as watched. If this is a problem just setup emails for each user.
Yup. Also, Gmail allows you to modify your email on the fly and all incoming mail goes to the same inbox…
