I have a friend, doesn’t live in my house, lives a few cities over, he and his family enjoy access to my Plex server. However, he has 2 small children, and currently because of this, I have things sort of quarantined off so that as Mom and Dad are choosing programming for their kids, they’re not seeing things they shouldn’t. It’s not anything too graphic mind you, as all of the imagery is from TVDB and MovieDB, but there are some things (for instance Naked News) that I keep in a separate section, just so the kids don’t see it while mom and dad are choosing things for them to watch. Mom and Dad watch the more adult oriented content while the kids are asleep or away, so it’s really just for the kids.
However, this creates clutter on the left hand side bar, more sections = more scrolls, clicks, and button presses to navigate, etc etc. Ideally I would have 2 sections, Movies, and TV Shows, and everyone would be happy. Since user management can be done via rating, it would be easy to have a profile or a secondary user locked to a specific rating. However, because profiles don’t exist for “Friends” only for “Home Users”, it means they would have to sign out and sign in each time they wanted to watch kid friendly content currently, or switch between kid friendly, and full library content.
Is there a particular reason a “Profiles” feature (similar to how Netflix is setup) hasn’t been implemented for accounts and the only thing we have is Home Users? I’m just curious really… It would certainly solve a lot of real world problems for people I am sure…
What you call “profiles”, is in Plex the membership in a Plex Home, with its feature “Fast User Switching”.
So you need two regular plex.tv accounts, which are in a Plex Home together. Then you share with both of them, but restrict access for the Kids account.
If you don’t want to see these two accounts in your Plex Home, it means that your friends need to create their own Plex Home.
Which in turn requires them to have a Plex pass of their own.
So hold on… If my friends create a Plex home (They don’t have a plex server to begin with, but I am not sure if that even matters), their home users don’t automatically have access to my server, right? So how does this help? Could you explain in detail?
We’re trying to avoid mom and dad having to sign out and sign in every time they want to watch content on my server for themselves, or watch content on my server for their kids… I don’t want to go the plex home route, because it would require me to drive over there and sign in with my account on all of their devices for that to work…
Their managed users don’t have access to your server.
However, if they create a second, regular plex.tv account for the kids, then you can share your server with this account as well.
There is no need.
Plex Home doesn’t necessarily mean managed users. You can invite reguilar user accounts into a Plex Home just as well. Which then makes Fast User Switching available to them.
They pay for a plex pass.
Create a Home users that have their own E-Mail which enables user switching.
I Invite the extra E-Mail and limit it by rating, and when they do user switching, that information is preserved.
Yeah, I saw that article, but I was unaware that it worked for people who didn’t have their Own Server, nor did it dawn on me that they could do user switching within their Plex home and it would keep my server information with their ratings locked…
