About User Restrictions

You can add managed users and Plex accounts to your Plex Media Server. This allows a user to have their own place where they can create their own playlists and media recommendations.

When sharing your content with other users it may be helpful to place restrictions on those user accounts. Restrictions can include what libraries the user can access and what content they can stream.

If you have Plex Pass, then you will have access to more restriction options for each user.

The following sections will explain the different restrictions Plex provides and how you can apply restrictions to each user on your server.

Restriction profiles

When you add a user to your Plex server you can specify a restriction profile. This profile will have preset restrictions on the content the user can stream from your server.

The preset restriction profiles are:

For each of the presets, similar ratings would also be included depending on which country you are using for the ratings.

One thing to note, if you do restrict the content for a user, that user cannot view any library by folder. This is because folder names cannot be hidden with restrictions, so Plex disables viewing a library by folder to prevent a user from viewing restricted media.

Plex Pass restrictions

As mentioned earlier, if you have Plex Pass you can fine-tune content restrictions for a user, regardless of the preset profile that has been selected.

The following restrictions can be set by a Plex Pass user:

Allow download

If you enable this for a user, then that user will be able to download media to their devices. This also enables the user to use the Plex API to download a media file.

The online Plex documentation states that only the server Admin can directly download a file to their computer using the Web App. Apparently, this limitation doesn't apply if calling the Plex API directly.

Allow access to Live TV and DVR

You can allow members of your Plex Home access to tune Live TV or both Live TV and DVR that have been set up. When this setting is enabled for a user, they will be able to use Live TV in supported apps.

They will be able to only manage their DVR recordings.

Ratings

The previous section talked about restriction profiles. With Plex Pass, you can modify the ratings for a user that has a preset profile assigned.

You can allow media with specific ratings, or do the inverse, and exclude content with specific ratings for a user.

You can add a rating to either be allowed or excluded and when you add a rating to one list, it will be removed from the other.

When you do restrict content by ratings, the ability for the user to view a library by folder will be disabled.

Labels

You can add labels to your media in your library. You can apply multiple labels to your media to help manage content restrictions.

Once labels have been assigned to your media you can then allow or exclude content for a user based on those labels.

If both ratings and labels are specified in user restrictions, both will be used to determine what media the user will be able to access. If no ratings are specified, then only the labels will be used to determine the restrictions.

As with ratings, restricting content by labels will prevent the user from viewing the library by folders.

At this time, it is not possible to restrict photo libraries by label.

Library restrictions

When you add a user to your Plex server you will need to specify what libraries they can access.

If the user only needs access to stream movies and TV shows, then you can just select the movie and TV show libraries for the user.

Many Plex administrators use this to restrict 4K content from being streamed by their users. They would create a separate library for their 4K content, and then not select that library to share with their users.

The reason for this is because at this time Plex doesn't allow restrictions by media specifications. If a user has access to a movie that has 1080p and 4K versions available they can stream either version.

One think to keep in mind, if you specify IP addresses that are allowed to use Plex without authenticating, such as when you would like to stream media from Plex without Internet access, all the restrictions are ignored. In that case, any user accessing Plex from one of those specified IP addresses would be accessing Plex as a administrator.

Plex provides different ways you can restrict content with users that share your Plex server. With Plex Pass, you can apply even more granular restrictions to a user account on your server.