I have a main library with all movies in it, as well as a separate kids library containing copies of movies in the main library.
If I play a movie which is common to both libraries, it will display twice on my ‘continue watching’ screen.
If I go to the kids library and go manage library > edit > advanced > visibility > remove from homescreen, that does the job for my account. But the kids accounts only have access to the kids library and now movies aren’t visible on the homescreen.
Is there a way to make these settings user specific?
Your problem is that your main directory scans the file folder you have it directed at and sees all the films including the kids film folder. (Example C:\Media\Movies)
Then your kids directory scans the kids folder nested inside the main movie folder and sees the kids films again. (Example C:\Media\Movies\Kids)
Plex sort of sees it as two files but not really. The only way I know to fix this is move the Kids movie folder out of the main movie folder. (Example C:\Media\Movies and C:\Media\Kids)
I do not know of another way to fix that as its not really a bug. Plex is doing what your telling it to. This is why my directories are separated into genre and then directed at folders that contain those genres. (Examples C:\Media\Action for Action films, C:\Media\Horror for Horror films etc.)
Or simply unpin the kids’ library from your main account. This won’t change Plex applying your watch progress to both libraries but it won’t show the unpinned kids library on the home screen.
Wouldn’t it still show it in the continue watching though? I don’t have my libraries like this so I honestly don’t know. But I thought the continue watching didn’t care about what was and wasn’t pinned to your home page. I’m at work otherwise I would try it.
Continue watching on the home screen only displays items from pinned libraries.
I think this is probably the best workaround to be honest. I have defaulted to using the top level account which contains all libraries, but I’d be better off creating a separate user account for myself without the duplicates. Will loose my watched history but that’s not the end of the world.
That’s good knowledge to have @tom80H and will probably save me some trouble somewhere down the line lol. Personally though I still don’t understand why folks choose to nest folders like that and create these issues in the first place. The issue is completely alleviated and imo the server will look better with truly separate libraries. To each their own I guess lol.
I suppose the cleaner approach will be to manage which files your managed users can see w/ sharing restrictions inside the same library – this way you don’t have the same item in multiple libraries giving you this redundancies in the first place. But that’s just my 2 ct… everybody can squeeze in their own use cases as long as they work 
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Absolutely. Its what makes Plex so great. The ability to display and serve your content as you see fit. I would pull my hair out though even knowing that those duplicates existed lol. I went with the genre based libraries years and years ago. I have a couple times thought about switching to two big libraries, one for movies, and one for TV, but I just can’t do it lol.
I keep the directories and libraries completely separate. I have /movies and then /kids/movies. Both directories have different files of the same film, eg: the /kids/movies is 5gb max per file and then the /movies are up to remux.
This way remote streaming f kids films barely uses any of my bandwidth as I just get other users to stream from the kids library rather than the movies library; in my experience kids don’t give a shinny sh*te about quality… they even watched an entire film having accidentally selected the German audio track, so they’re not going to notice the difference between a WebDL and a remux!
That makes more sense. Seems like a difficult situation to solve for. I was going to say that you could nest the videos together (high and low quality versions) and then set bandwidth limits on the clients that will hopefully force the clients to select the lower quality version automatically. My understanding is that if a lower bitrate version of the file is available that meets the bandwidth restrictions of the client Plex can detect that and automatically select for playback the file that meets those requirements. You can do this for all of your users by forcing a universal bandwidth restriction in the server settings, which would allow you to have one beautiful library that contains high and low bitrate versions of your movies while forcing remote clients to use the lower bitrate files.
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