I have a couple managed users for my kids. I also have about a dozen friends who share their libraries with me. Is there a way for my kids to access those shared libraries through their accounts? Would they need their own Plex accounts and have my friends share with those Plex accounts?
@kingdave said:
I have a couple managed users for my kids. I also have about a dozen friends who share their libraries with me. Is there a way for my kids to access those shared libraries through their accounts?
No.
Would they need their own Plex accounts and have my friends share with those Plex accounts?
Yes.
Simply because your Plex friends shared with you.
Now silently adding more people to the share is not fair and may represent a major increase in load to their server(s).
That’s why they must explicitly share with your kids as well.
So they are aware and can make a conscious decision for or against it.
I would argue that “you” in this case also includes at least your managed users. The plex team promotes the plex home as the solution for controlling access on your different clients in your home. For example if you don’t want all you libraries to be visible in the living room you should create a managed user “Living room” and set the preferred access. All this fails because you can then no longer access your shared libraries.
As I said in a similar thread, in my opinion possible abuse problems should be solved in different ways for example restricting maximum simultaneous streams or similar, mixing the issues up just causes unnecessary limitations on the application. The alternative is the build a whole new system were we can have different restrictions for the admin account for different clients, which of course would be nice, but that’s alot more work than just using a system we already have in place.
I have to agree with Jven; I’ve allowed my friend access my movie library on my server. I’m happy for them to allow their children to watch movies from my server. I also actively encourage them to manage their own children’s parental restrictions, which is a great feature of the “Home/Managed User”. I think Plex has done a fantastic job with the managed users but the only workaround here is I create multiple different libraries based on movie ratings (G Movies, PG Movies, …) then share the appropriate number of libraries with each individual user. This seems rather archaic given the quality of the infrastructure you already have…
You should be able to limit uploads or simultaneous connections far better than this
Agreed with Jven and kfadgen.
While I understand and respect Plex’s decision to keep sharing decisions strictly with the originator, why do Managed Home users need their own plex account to receive the shares? This removes the purpose of being managed users in a Home.
Feature Request - Allow shares to be sent to Managed home users, just like they can be invited to full plex users. Some syntax like (in my case) “Thespian2/ManagedUser1” - The full plex user home manager would be informed, and have to approve any shares to their managed home users.
This still allows the server manager complete control of with whom they are sharing, and the Home manager to mediate what gets shared with people in their home, while allowing managed home users to receive shared libraries.
Everyone is happy.
Yep, this should be a no brainer. I didn’t even realize this limitation until I logged into my admin account to look at a few things. Only then did I realize that my users didn’t have access to remote servers in the same way I do. Simply put, you’re not going to create more load on a remote server by having managed users than if you didn’t. Without managed users you could still have multiple users simultaneously accessing a remote server.
Quite simply, I want to be able to manage the content and libraries that I allow access to for my kids without login (parent accounts are PIN enabled), but that shouldn’t restrict them from being able to access a remote server. This seems like something that should be implementable. It’d also be nice to be able to restrict what libraries from a remote user are accessible to user accounts, but I’d settle for being able to also allow visibility to already shared libraries.
