We have been long time users of Plex. Plex simply rocks. How much does it rock? So much so that we literally moved across the world with our Mac mini and 3T USB drives and didnt miss a beat.
One of the problems I ran into recently was one of parental controls. With Plex you can restrict what type of content your users can watch through labels and content ratings. That’s awesome. But what if you want to restrict a very specific movie or movies. Both labels and ratings work on the positive sense. Meaning you are limited to allow users to view this content ratings and/labels. What you cannot do is negative selection, like allow everything except for this content rating and/labels.
So while Plex provides a solution through labels for my problem, the issue would have been that I’d need to label all of my content.
The solution was to use custom ratings. Ratings are automatically generated. This means you don’t need to do it yourself. For specific content or movies, you can edit the content rating to a custom value; restricted for example. As part of sharing you can say allow all of these content ratings (I recommend selecting each one of them) except for restricted.
Now you might be thinking why would you need to be so specific? Why not just use the normal labels or content ratings, specially for parental controls? This works fine for when the user is a specific user, like a child’s iPad. But what if the user is the entire family? The main TV for example? You don’t want to be switching users back and forth do you? You want a pretty open, yet partly restricted account.
Finally, this didn’t come as a problem for storing porn, though it would solve that issue. It came as a problem for storing adult content with curious names. Curious names like Love, Crash, etc. Names that little kids, with curious minds will naturally dig into.
I hope you find this useful. Keep on Plexing…