Is there a workaround/hacky way to share multiple single episodes to multiple friends?

Server Version#: 1.31.1.6733

Hi all. I have a television library and I’d like to share only the episodes that aired 40 years ago with some friends, within the week (i.e., since today is 3/3/23, it’d show the episodes airing between 25/2/83-3/3/83).

I see in the feature requests section there’s a few threads about adding Sharing tags to individual episodes but it doesn’t seem to be a feature with a lot of momentum, so I’ve tried a couple of workarounds:

  • Creating a smart collection with filters based around the Episode Air Date. The collection itself works perfectly, but when I add a tag in the Sharing tab and restrict access to that tag, the collection appears empty to the other user, presumably since they only have access to the collection but not the stuff inside it.
  • Since there’s no individual episode Sharing labels, setting up a script that goes through and changes the Content Rating on every episode that didn’t air within that week to TV-MA, and the ones that did to TV-G, then restricting the television library based on rating. The script works but the Content Ratings in the Restrictions tab for the user appears to ignore individual episodes and just use the show’s rating, so it just shows all the shows listed TV-G. Removing the show’s content rating makes no difference beyond not showing the TV-G shows anymore, I checked.

I’m out of ideas here, beyond the frustratingly slow and inefficient method to go into Plex every day and manually share individual episodes with each friend, removing the ones that have aged out. Can anyone think of a better method to do this?

You can grant access to a playlist only. Should be able to set the same rules for a smart playlist as a smart collection. As long as you don’t have any restrictions set for TV for the user they should all show up.

You can also just edit the filters of the smart playlist to change what they have access to without having to go through the access flow. As soon as you save the changes to filter they will see the updated smart playlist.

This is one i made based on episode date that they an view in the “Shared” source. can click on episode titles to get to individual details pages if they want

You’re my hero!!

I can’t believe how much time I wasted today trying to set it up, installing Plex API and trying to brute force it, when it was so simple. Thank you so much!

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