Hey Guys,
I’ve kept my eye out for any updates or articles to enable some kind of parental control for Plex Media Server for a long time now. The reality is that it’s going to be hard to police what our kids watch on the family TV without having to enter a code/password or if you have a futuristic smart TV that has a camera that detects who is sitting in front of it.
However, for Plex clients you may have in other rooms, or mobile devices, you may be interested in a solution that seems to work okay in my household. It involves using PMS with a plexPass and CouchPotato, an awesome open source ‘media management’ web app available on most platforms.
Firstly, I note that most of you manually divide your Movies in to seperate folders based upon what you deem is appropriate. This is similar concept which is more automated. I have all my media stored centrally on a Synology NAS and have CouchPotato Server installed on this. My media is shared via SMB to PMS installed on a virtualised Windows 2012 R2 server. You may have a different setup - as long as CouchPotato has access to your media share/folder it will do the job.
Start by installing CouchPotato (https://couchpota.to/). I won’t go through the installation and setup, as there will be many How-To’s out that specifically cover this elsewhere. CouchPotato’s core function is to assist with automating downloads, but it also has some pretty nifty media management. You can play with the rest of it later.
Next create a base folder called ‘Movies’ on your preferred media storage location. You can leave it empty, as CP will automatically populate it later.
You now need to create another folder which you can call ‘CouchPotato Processing’. Its not important where you create the two folders, as long as CP has r/w access to both.
Open your CP web console and browse to Settings > Renamer — Ensure ‘Rename Downloaded Movies’ is enabled. Regardless of whether your movies are from a DVD backup or elsewhere, we can use this feature.
In the ‘From’ field, enter your CouchPotato Processing path. i.e. /volume1/Video/CouchPotato Processing/
In the ‘To’ field, enter your base Movies path. i.e. /volume1/Video/Movies
In the ‘Folder Naming’ field, enter the following: / ()
In the ‘File Naming’ field, enter the following: .
If you can’t free type the last two fields, you’ll have to use the Add Option fly out.
Enable the ‘Show Advanced settings’ field flag in the top right corner and ensure that the ‘Force Every’ field is set to something like 2 (hours)
Now here's where the magic begins, and it does depend a bit on the format of your files and naming convention. Find one of your favourite movie files and move/copy it in to the 'CouchPotato Processing' folder. Rather than wait 2hrs for CP to scan the contents of the folder, grab the API code from the CP Settings > General page and insert it in the following URL:
http://:/api//renamer.scan i.e. http://192.168.1.50:5050/api/9497dsff79db496a90da7741aff0a189/renamer.scan
This will force the scan immediately. With any luck you can check your new Movies folder and see a new subfolder with the movie rating, and a renamed movie folder and file below it. i.e. G\Curious George (2006), or R\Heat (1995). Try moving in some more files. Once you get more confident with the results you can start moving your whole library in to the processing folder. You may see some folders created such as Approved or ATP, but these are exceptions you can deal with as they come up.
If you find that some files are not being processed, and new .ignore files are being created, the workaround is to rename the files to the IMDB movie code. i.e. Look up the movie on IMDB.com and grab the tt code from the URL - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113277/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 - I sometimes find you need to do this with some obscure or similar titles.
Enter Plex. Here’s what you need to do on the PMS.
- Create two new Libraries. One called “Movies’, and another one called “Kids Movies”.
- Configure the Movies library to reference the core “Movies” folder created earlier.
- Configure the Kids Movies library to include _only_ the new subfolders created as you feel necessary for your kids. i.e. G, PG, TV-G, TV-PG. In my case, I have a young teenager I’ve create another library for which includes the PG-13 folder also.
- Configure the 'Require authentication on local networks’ option under Settings > Connect (ensure Show Advance options is set). This ensures they can't log out and browse all libraries.
As many of you have already done, ensure you have a Plex account set up each child or TV/Plex Client you want to control. On the kids TV/Plex client, log in using the appropriate account. Before they see the new libraries, you will need to share them from your Plex.tv account - https://plex.tv/servers
And that’s it. Rather then manually sifting through files and moving them to the right location, just dump everything in to the CP Processing folder to do the hard work, regardless of where the files come from.
Hopefully this Parental Control works for you until the Plex team release MPAA ratings based access and pin codes.
Very nice write up.
This is pretty much how I have enable parental control as well.
The couchpotato rename feature with the MPAA rating as a folder as worked great for me.
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