A restriction option, that allows added friends & users to access your media, ONLY when on your local network.
You have friends & family that visit and stay over often. Or several family members as Plex Home is designed for.
They have their own Plex accounts and apps installed on their personal devices.
You’re happy to give them all access to your media whilst on your local network; it can handle the demand. So you add them as friends or additional users.
BUT, you don’t want these users to access media remotely. Preventing simultaneous demand from multiple users, clogging the upload, and requiring you to keep your server on for other people’s use.
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Hopefully this is a simple option that can be added under “Restrictions” for each friend or user that the library is shared with?
Thanks for the suggestion, I think you mean to add them as “managed users”?
My reality is a brother in Dubai, and one in Singapore. Both have their own Plex accounts on phones/ tablets etc.
So when they come stay over, they shouldn’t need to change accounts on their personal devices to access my media whilst connected to my local network, and then losing access to their own media back home.
Until if and when your request gets implemented the workaround I would suggest is to add their plex accounts as shared users to your PMS but do not share any libraries with them until they are at your home.
You can keep them as a shared users without sharing any libraries with them.
@marcisikoff: It sounds like you just need to make use of the “managed users” function. Plex Home (not the same as PHT) caters precisely for your needs. You will need to purchase Plex Pass (you need this for access to the Plex Home function).
@hthighway: That seems to be the simplest workaround for my situation. Good idea! Hopefully it’s agreed that offering this one setting I’ve suggested would be most simple, especially in other household scenarios involving multiple people who each already have their own Plex accounts.
The easiest way would be when your family members are visiting, sign out and disconnect from plex.tv (connect tab). This will temporarily remove PlexHome but give your family members free access to your server. When they leave, log back in.
If you still need remote access for yourself, create a second plex.tv account. Log your PMS to plex.tv using this second account. Use this account on your remote devices. This will leave your server open to your family but give you remote access.
Thanks MovieFan, another feasible workaround that I’ll check out. I wonder what the Plex team think, I can’t imagine this would be difficult to implement at all. This idea isn’t likely to get massive number of votes, but it is simple, effective, and makes sensible.
Until if and when your request gets implemented the workaround I would suggest is to add their plex accounts as shared users to your PMS but do not share any libraries with them until they are at your home.
You can keep them as a shared users without sharing any libraries with them.
This works but has an annoying side affect.
Once you remove the user from all of your libs and then add them back it requires the user to accept a new invitation via email.
Depending on how often you need to do this it's either a minor thing or an annoyance, but it does work.
Carlo
PS If you leave them access to at least one library on your system (maybe one they won't want to use) then the invite isn't needed.
@MovieFan: I thought that creating this thread in this forum itself was the way to make a feature request? Please let me know if there’s some other way. Thanks!
Sorry, forgot this was in the feature request section. The discussion took a slight turn more towards alternatives and became more a question then a request.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if you remove them from the friends list, don't they lose their "Watched" status? I think removing libraries from their accounts does the same thing?
I don't know this for sure, but just thinking about it, this is how I would think it works... Maybe someone else knows more?
I just tested this again, unchecked all shared libraries for a user, then added those libraries back.
The user does have to accept the share again of those libraries, but all of the "Watched/UnWatched" info remained intact.
Thanks for checking on this. It's good to know for future use. It definitely could become a tool for administering a local user's base.
Share out to someone, add in the libraries when they come over, remove the libraries when they go home, and when they come over again, add the libraries back... At least this works to prevent them using the server remotely, if you don't want them to.
I just tested this again, unchecked all shared libraries for a user, then added those libraries back.
The user does have to accept the share again of those libraries, but all of the "Watched/UnWatched" info remained intact.
Yea, and the ONLY reason to leave them access to one library as I mentioned is to avoid the invite. Probably just depends on how often you will be adding the person which way to go.
Once or twice a year is easy to deal with the invite. Every weekend or similar and you might want to keep access to a library.
There actually is another way but it's a hack requiring a change to the username in the database. So I wouldn't recommend this unless you know SQL and/or are comfortable playing like this (with a backup).
There actually is another way but it's a hack requiring a change to the username in the database. So I wouldn't recommend this unless you know SQL and/or are comfortable playing like this (with a backup).
Can you explain what you are thinking here? From what I have seen the user information in the database is cached from plex.tv. Changes in the DB do not reflect back to plex.tv. As an example, if you delete all the users from your account table (minus the admin), exit PMS, and restart. All the user info comes right back.
Yea, maybe I shouldn't have said that before actually testing it. I believe you are correct as I forgot about the info coming back.
But to answer your question I was thinking something along the lines of renaming their userid.
I'd give it a quick test but I've got people on both of my servers at the moment. I can try it later unless you already know it won't work MovieFan.???
