Shared playlists

General Discussions Plex Features
1

I just discovered that Plex does not permit shareable or collaborative playlists. What. In. The. Ever. Loving. F*ck. I’m sorry to be crude, but I am just, like…why? Why? Why would you ignore something so basic. You can’t imagine how a household (spouses) might want to dump a bunch of tracks together to each have access to them? Like why I might want to work with my wife to create a holiday playlist for summer holidays coming up. F** you.

And while we’re at it, why the f*ck doesn’t Plex cast straight to any DLNA device? I have two HEOS speakers and Plex won’t cast to them. Why? The point of DLNA was to get the entire tech industry on board with basic standards to make lives simpler for people, not harder. And here you are bucking the trend.

Emby has these features which make it amazing, but you know what? Emby DOESN’T WORK IN CARPLAY! It’s completely dysfunctional. So, that’s like a major downside.

Why can’t we have nice things?

My god tech bros are going to be the death of us all.

2

We have never had collaborative Playlists - however - it is possible to share a playlist with another user through our web client where it is called Grant Access on the playlist menu. Also, assuming you are a server owner you can create Collections which are similar and are available to other users on your server.

As for DLNA, it is still supported and without additional information it is tough to try and help out here. I would suggest double checking the DLNA settings on your server and checking out our DLNA support article.

Thanks for the feedback. It stinks that things aren’t working right now in the way you want but hopefully you can find a solution that works.

edited this answer as I wrote it up wrong and got an assist for clarification purposes. Original incorrect text:
We have never had collaborative shared Playlists - however - assuming you are a server owner you can create Collections which are similar and are available to other users on your server. Playlists have always been scoped to a single user.

3

Thanks for replying. It is nice to see such engagement.

I can find a hack for the playlists issue, by just setting up a common household user and all of us working from that.

But, not being able to cast to DLNA is super frustrating. Somewhere @elan has a thread talking about DLNA being in the past and objectively bad. I don’t get it. It would be exceptionally useful to me.

My plexamp casts fine to a Roku TV, but cannot cast to my HEOS steroes. Why?

4

@McWanke So I created a music playlist and I granted access to two friends. Where do they find the playlist in their user interface? Neither are seeing it.

5

To start with, based on the information from the discussion around the AMA question - have your shared that library with your friends?

6

Yes. It’s a music playlist and I have shared that library with them.

7

Please add the ability to:

  • Share playlists with Friends the same way Collections are shared.

  • Preserve autoplay functionality.

  • Even a read-only shared playlist mode would solve this — server owners curate, friends consume.

The collections road does have the autoplay feature. I have over 2000, 30-60 second clips. Having to click on each one is arduous. Having 20 user click on this is 40,000 unnecessary clicks. I have went through the trouble of adding all 2000 to playlists of 50 items in each to only to find I am the only one that can see it.

I’ve been running Plex for years and share my server with a large group of friends (around 20 people). Over time, I’ve curated 400+ playlists containing thousands of items (movies, clips, TV episodes). Playlists are central to how we watch — autoplaying through curated marathons, themed nights, or music videos.

But there’s a fundamental limitation:

  • Playlists are account-bound. Only the creator can see or use them.

  • Collections are shareable, but they do not autoplay, so they are not a real replacement for playlists.

  • Managed Users (Plex Home) inherit playlists, but external Friends do not.

  • The only current workarounds are:

    • Give out my main Plex login (huge security risk), or

    • Force every friend to manually rebuild playlists (impossible with hundreds of lists and thousands of items).

I did see the 2021 “cleanup” where single-item shares were internally treated as playlists. That’s not the same as what I (and many others) need. The real-world issue is multi-item playlist sharing with Friends, with autoplay intact. This would unlock enormous value for Plex users who share their servers with family and communities.

Thank you for considering — I’m confident I’m not alone in needing this.

1 Like
8

As mentioned above, you can grant access to a playlist.

9

I’ve granted access. But where do they find it is my question? I even granted a home user access to it and I don’t see it anywhere.

10

Single Item shares are appearing in the Shares library. You might have to pin this onto the side bar.