None of my users can see shared media

Server Version#: 4.50.1
Player Version#: 4.50.1(web)

I have tried sharing individual songs, music playlists, and video playlists to a variety of users (friends, home, and managed users). But none of them cam see the shared media. According to the documentation, I am expecting to see a “Shared” library, but I don’t see that on any of the users.

If I go to Users & Sharing on either the admin or recipient of the share, I do see it there. But I don’t see any actual media.

In addition, I have observed that only the admin user seems to have the ability to even attempt to share media. No other user types can share anything.

The admin user is a PlexPass user. The other users are not but should be inheriting the server settings.

The other users can see the actual Shared Library (called Music) in this case.

Is there a setting somewhere? I have searched everywhere.

Only you can share things from your server. Other users don’t own your server so they can’t set up shares from it.

Keep in mind that if you’ve setup restrictions for these users, they won’t see the items you shared. For example, if you set it so they only see music with the label “Music for Bob” and you then share them some other music that doesn’t have this label, they won’t see it.

These are all home users. Some are regular users and some are managed users, but the behavior seems to be the same. And they are all on the same server.

So, only the admin can share? non-admin users can’t share a playlist or other media to other users on the same server? Seems like they should be able to. That would definitely be a useful feature.

And there were no restrictions on the users. However, the “Shared” tab did finally show up on the other users. It just took 3-4 hours. Once the tab finally showed up, I tried to share another playlist from the admin account. Again, that took many hours. So, there is something going on there.

Yes. No.

Yeah, that seems wrong. What type of media is the playlist for and how many items are there?

These are just music playlists with a 10 or so test items in them. The entire library is only 1500 tracks. I notice that unsharing (or deleting) a playlist is also taking an extremely long time.

I can see that there are no shares right now on your account. Can you share something then right back right away with the time you sent the share so I can check when it reached plex.tv.

Edit - To be clear, I can’t see what you share just when it was shared.

I just created a share called “Test1” with a few songs in it at 6:25pm CST. I shared it with a regular user and a managed user. It has not shown up in either place yet.

The regular user also still shows a playlist that I deleted earlier today.

I see a playlist shared to a regular user at 6:24 and to a managed user at 6:25. What client are you using to check if the share is available?

I am using the Web UI. Last night, shared another playlist at 7:50pm CST. It didn’t show up for a couple hours.

I did notice something interesting. I was adding some music (FLAC files) to my library. I clicked the Scan Library button and it gave me an error that the server couldn’t connect to the internet. No idea why. I restarted Plex and that process worked fine.

So far this morning, playlist shares and un-shares are showing up pretty quickly. Does sharing a playlist make a call out to the internet? Not sure why Plex had that issue since there were no network problems. But that could at least explain this issue as a symptom.

Yes. Sharing is done through plex.tv. If you can’t access the internet or otherwise having connection issues to plex.tv, shares don’t work.

When yo were testing, did you have both accounts open in different browser windows and just waited to see when it would show up? If so, your browser for the recipient account may not have refreshed the page. Manually refresh the page and you may see the share quicker.

Thanks. And I did plenty of refreshes. Must have been Plex thinking it is disconnected from the internet (when it wasn’t). I will keep an eye on the issue.

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