Perhaps I’m missing something, but why would you allow an Invited Home User the ability to switch users to any other Managed User? If I’m inviting someone into my Plex Server as a Home User, they have should not be switching to all my other Managed Users accounts. I know you can secure each Managed User with codes, but my kids are Managed Users and they don’t want to key in a 4 digit number every time they watch TV. When I invite my parents or friends in as a Home User, they have no need to access all my other Managed Users accounts. When an Invited Home User signs in, they should only have access to their account and not all the other Managed Users accounts.
It’s because Home/Managed users are presumed to be living in your house, sharing main televisions/devices, and wanting/needing their own separate playback history, as well as you being the admin needing the ability to regulate different content for different individuals. For example, your wife can have access to your porn library, but maybe your seven year old daughter shouldn’t. If you don’t want them to be able to switch, change them to a regular invited user, and give them permission to specific libraries.
This is definitely a feature, it’s not a bug, and doing it any other way would cause anyone sharing devices (like a main TV) to have to log off one account, and log into another account, including you, which becomes extremely inconvenient.
If you share your server with ppl which are not living with you in the same household, you should use the button ‘Share Libraries’ instead.
To prevent your Home users from accidentally or intentionally switching into the wrong user profile, each user can add a 4-digit PIN to his/her account.
Thanks, It looks like I should have been using the ‘Share Libraries’ feature instead. Thanks for pointing that out. I checked it out and it does what I was looking for… I guess the only downside is the person invited to the share will not have access to my Plex Pass features, like unlimited mobile viewing and Live TV.
OttoKerner pointed out that the “Share Library” function is what I’m looking for. He is right, except the person invited to the share can’t use my Plex Pass features like unlimited mobile viewing and Live TV.
That is correct, and that was also the same function I advised you to use, I just didn’t use the proper term. You can invite users, or you can invite home users… I meant not to invite them as home users.
Your users who are not plex pass users will need to pay a 1-time fee for the mobile app of $5 or whatever it is, and they will not have access to livetv and dvr.
So, if they need free mobile app, and livetv, the only way to do it is through home users, and home users will need to lock accounts via pin and switch user accordingly, whether they live in your home or not.
Thanks for the clarifications. But I’m still confused as to why you would use Invite Home User instead of just adding someone as a Managed User if they are in your home. Is there some advantage other than the person wanted to use their own Plex account or perhaps you didn’t want to give them access to your Plex account creds? You can still limit libraries to someone whether they are a Home User or a Managed User.
Giving Home members their own full plex.tv account has these advantages:
they can sign-in plex clients without knowing the plex credentials of the Home admin (because they have their own username and password)
they can access additional shared servers (from other Plex users. Regular managed users cannot access servers which were shared with the admin of their Plex Home)
managed home users (those that are under the admin plex account) plex doesn’t know which user is watching, so all profiles should be available to switch to (if pin is required, it will need entered). Managed users should NOT be able to switch to UNmanaged user profiles
un-managed home users (those that have their OWN plex account) should ONLY have access to their OWN profile (because plex knows it is a separate account).
