Best Practice for Multiple Users

[Veto1630]

Hey all!

Trying to improve my *arr + Jellyfin setup and am wondering if what I'm trying to achieve is even possible.
Sorry if this is asked/answered somewhere else, I don't see anything similar on the forum and I haven't been able to find much recent discussion ever since the subreddit was killed.

Simplified scenario: I have 2 users, Adam and Bob, who request movies via OMBI that automatically get sent to Radarr and ultimately added to their respective Jellyfin libraries.

Adam's movies go to /media/Adam/Movies
Bob's movies go to /media/Bob/Movies

Each of these directories is a Library in Jellyfin and each user only has access to their own Library.

This works perfectly... until they both want the same movie in their library. If Adam requests the movie first, then Bob is unable to also request it because it already exists in Radarr and Jellyfin but he can't view it because it doesn't exist in his Jellyfin library.

Is there a better way I could set this up in Jellyfin so that they each only see their own movies, but can also overlap and see the same movie when needed?

Plex has a feature that lets you restrict a user's access via tags. So in this case I would be able to add both the "Adam" and "Bob" tag to the movie and they would both have access. I haven't come across anything like this in Jellyfin but I feel like there has to be a way to (automatically) accomplish this that I'm totally missing or overlooking!

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[TheDreadPirate]

Automatically? Not that I'm aware of. You could use symlinks to make shared movies accessible to both libraries.

[Veto1630]

Ah bummer! 

Is what I'm trying to do crazy/stupid though? Is there a more elegant way to have multiple users on a Jellyfin server besides simply "show everyone everything in one giant library"?

Feels like I'm becoming an edge case which usually hints to me I'm doing something wrong lol

Thanks for the reply and thanks for the sanity check!

[tmsrxzar]

here's an idea, i havent tried it personally but when you mentioned access based on tags it made me think of it

visit dashboard -> users -> (username) -> parental control

it has the opposite of inclusive tags, "Block items with tags"

in theory you could tag all of Adams movies "Adam" and block that tag for Bob, opposite for Bob -> Adam

any shared movies will have no tags and therefor "Global"

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the logistics of managing tags may not be ideal but maybe more so than symlinks
need to make sure jellyfin doesn't remove/overwrite them on a library refresh otherwise things will just get merged
(when changing tags, scroll down it has a section for "Enable", uncheck Tags to lock tags)

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*edit

there is an open PR for "Allowed Tags" that may get merged eventually, if you're the compile it yourself type you could add it to yours while you wait; it's already almost a year old now

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/pull/4338

[TheDreadPirate]

Its not that you're "doing it wrong". Just that this isn't an intended use case for Jellyfin. It was intended to be a "home" media server. Everyone has access to everything. You can do some symlink tricks for things like a kid's "curated library" kind thing. But Jellyfin isn't not intended as a dynamic, automated "service" like Netflix or Hulu and there is no intention, afaik, that move in that direction.

[tmsrxzar]

even as a home server there is a use case for separate media by user though

[TheDreadPirate]

even as a home server there is a use case for separate media by user though

Absolutely.  And there is SOME functionality to support that.  Just not dynamically and automatically like Veto needs.

[AnonymousWebHacker]

I feel like I got lost in some parts. "Different routes for different users?" ? WTF

I understand that you have the jellyfin server indexing everything that is in /media/ , which indexes both what is in /media/user1 and what is in /media/user2 .

Until then everything is great.


The problem starts when you have OMBI and Radarr downloading content from 2 different users on different routes, instead of on a common route.
If user1 and user2's downloads went to the same download path, this problem would not happen.

Which means (at least in my opinion) it is bad practice to have /media/user1 and /media/user2, instead of having only /media/ .

On the other hand, user1 identifies himself to the OMBI server, and makes his movie request, and user2 does the same. (I suppose that OMBi has implemented that if 2 users request the same content and one is already downloaded or available,) those errors do not occur.

However, if it does not exist, simply do not create an example user (UserRequests) common to both so that they can use it to access the OMBi and download the content.