I’m trying to understand how Grant Access is supposed to work. I’m trying to grant access to an individual item. I select the Grant Access and it presents me with a dialog stating
Give access to by selecting a friend or entering the email of a new user and inviting them to Plex. New users will be asked to accept the invitation.
There’s a place to enter a username or email. I select the user and hit send. Now what is supposed to happen? Cause it didn’t get any notification or email.
Note I have a test user that I use to test such things so I expected Plex to send an email to that test user’s email address (which is my personal email). It never did.
If the user already has a Plex account, he will see the invitation to access the media in his account. (under “Requests”) https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/profile
He must accept the invitation before the access can commence.
I guess I was just expecting an email. Much like what users get when you share a movie with friends. I didn’t think to log in as my test user to look for stuff.
That said, I think the notification on the receiver’s end needs improvement. When the remote user goes to their “Home” screen there is no indication there are any “requests”. I’m not sure how nor why a neophyte computer user would want to or even think about looking for some notification.
And what exact access am I granting this user that they don’t already have?
I think all of this would be handled a lot better just thinking that Grant Access or Share with Friends should all be just “Share this thing with this user” be it a movie, series, individual episode, artist, album, song… IOW, like the Unix philosophy - everything’s just a file (and therefore shareable). And for notifications, there should be options to configure to use say text or email or carrier pigeon, whatever - IOW is separately configurable based on how the individual user wishes to be notified. In any respect, how is this remote, possibly very computer-leary, older person supposed to ascertain that there is something for him/her to be notified about?
Only you can answer that question. After all it was you who did
With that being said: if you did only share a single media item instead of a whole library, all of these items should appear within the special “Shared” library.
So you are saying I can deny access to a user for say libA but then grant access to that user for libA/video.mp4? Seems odd. Or say I didn’t bother to grant access to the user for the library “TV Shows” but then could grant access for “TV Shows/TV Series/Episode 4.mp4”? Again seems a little odd.
As for what I’m trying to share, they are in a library that is not a movie or TV library. PlMS doesn’t give me the option of sharing the folder of video files I wish to share with my friends so yes, I am attempting to share individual files. I don’t think creating a whole library for a single folder of “tonight’s performance” only to then add this library to my friend’s list of available libraries then to have to somehow alert them to "Hey dudes - tonight’s open mic can be viewed in this new library
Two problems. First, I can’t find this Home & Library Access item either on my Plex server user or my test Plex user.
Secondly, and more importantly, I find the notification of this on the side of the receiver to be poor at best. It requires that the user seek out and find the Shared menu. Often this will be in the More section and well, my users have never been that adventurous. Plus, not seeing the Shared item there is no indication that there’s something to pay attention to or to hunt for. Indeed, on the Shared screen, it lists each library shared. I have split my libraries up into many libraries. Perhaps I shouldn’t but I have. So not, not only did I have to search for it (well this article pointed it out to me), and get to it but even then I didn’t see the thing I shared. I had to notice and scroll to find it. Plus, since I can’t find Home & Library Access I can’t delete it from the shared area to keep that clean.
I suggest that just like the notification I get as a server owner that there’s a new version of PMS, that there should be a similar notification when somebody “grants access” to an idea (personally I’d just called it shared an item). When the user clicks the notification there should be a link there to the Shared section. Plus all newly shared things should float to the top so they are noticed. We need to make this easy for the neophyte and technologically challenged users to be dead simple and noticed ('cause such users are not naturally inquisitive to start off).
