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Manage your Home with Emby Users


Luke

68549 views

Team,

 

Today, we're going to show you how you can be the master of your domain with Emby Users. Why create separate user accounts for each member of your household? Because users can have their own personalized media libraries, user data, recommendations, parental controls, security settings, and more. Users are managed by opening the server dashboard and navigating to Users.

 

Users

 

Users are generally intended to be people who don't already have an online Emby Connect account. This is where most people will add the members of their household:

 

users1.png

 

 

A user will be displayed with a cloud if they're linked to Emby Connect. Why link to Emby Connect? Connect allows easy sign in away from home, where nothing more is needed than a username and password.

 

users6.png

 

Guests

 

Guests are fundamentally the same as Users, but they provide an easy way to invite someone who already has an Emby Connect account. This will easily import their display name and image into your server.

 

Feature Access

 

To manage user feature access, start by visiting the Users page and clicking on a user account. Features can easily be granted or denied, such as the ability to sync media, view live tv, manage live tv, etc. The "Allow media playback" option determines if the user is able to play media or not. This option is handy if you'd like to setup a guest user who can browse the library but not play anything.

 

users21.png

 

Content Access

 

Content access allows you to configure the libraries a user is allowed to access.

 

users23.png

 

 

Channel access also provides the same ability to control what your users can view and what they can't:

 

users24.png

 

Device Access

 

Device access allows you to configure the devices a user is allowed to sign in from. By default, users can use any device.

 

users17.png

 

Parental Controls by Rating

 

Easily block content from users based on their official rating:

 

users13.png

 

 

But sometimes it's also handy to control blocking of unrated content:

 

users14.png

 

Parental Controls by Tags

 

Content can also be restricted based on the presence of tags:

 

users15.png

 

Tags are treated recursively, meaning you can easily block an entire TV series just adding a tag at the series level.

 

Parental Controls by Access Scheduling

 

Easily block access during certain hours by creating access schedules. Now you'll never have to worry about your kids streaming videos during their biology lectures.

 

users16.png

 

Advanced Controls

 

Need to quickly disable user accounts? Would you like to hide certain accounts from app login screens? Easily do that with advanced controls.

 

You can even take away a user's ability to edit their own profile settings. Maybe you don't want your kids accidentally changing their preferred subtitle language. Or maybe you have all your kids on one shared kids account and you'd like to manage the profile preferences yourself.

 

users20.png

 

Passwords

 

Easily create passwords to keep your accounts secure and safe.

 

54f9fc46f186e_pw1.png

 

But we all know that passwords can be cumbersome in the living room, so that's why we offer an Easy Pin Code feature for in-home use:

 

54f9fca783406_pw2.png

 

Activity Log

 

Follow what your users are doing. Just about everything appears in the activity log, from signing in to signing out, playing or pausing content, changing passwords, settings, and more.

 

54f9ff453e03c_rm3.png

 

See What They're Watching, in Real-time

 

The server dashboard also gives you real-time access to monitor what your users are currently watching.

 

54f9ffb238504_rm1.png

 

Easy Remote Control

 

Need to quickly remote control a user's app? This is easily done with the remote control functions built into the web interface. Stop, pause, rewind, change audio, subtitles, and more with the tap of a finger.

 

54fa0005935f3_rm2.png

 

The over-sized buttons make them very easy to tap on a smartphone or tablet, which makes it quite fun to flick through the scene selection menu:

 

54fa037039211_rm5.png

 

 

You can even send directional input just like a real remote:

 

54fa007ce1d12_rm4.png

 

We hope this gives you a little more information on what Emby Users can do. If you still have your whole family on one shared account, try creating user profiles. We think you'll enjoy them :)

  • Like 15

41 Comments


Recommended Comments



ginjaninja

Posted

Ive been using an account "guest" for a while now. I have a guide in guest bedrooms on how to connect and use service from tablets etc..

I limit the service to content and channels which don't consume internet bandwidth as its limited..and the account cant be used remotely (the full password is not shared, only the internal one).

Works well. The ability for users to spawn their own account tied dynamically to the rights of the master guest account, so they can maintain their own watched list, might be nice...but then i could just create them an account...that or they are probably coming around too often!

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Chillout

Posted

would be nice if you could copy user settings when adding a new user (ie, copy guest1 settings when creating guest2 user)

  • Like 3
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So, can we get Windows Accounts/Active Directory/LDAP authentication (or automated account generation) implemented soon, as well?

  • Like 1
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I started a new thread yesterday regarding the inability of the access scheduler to kick users when their allotted end time has passed, is this bug on the to do list?

  • Like 1
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breezytm

Posted

I would like the ability to reset my guest account, an account created for family members who comes to visit, played state back to unwatched after the user logs off. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
diaz1510

Posted

K...I started using this feature recently and it's growing on me.  The wife and I can watch/track our seperate shows and if she watches somethign without me and I want ot watch it later, it doesn't disappear from Suggestions list.

 

BUT...it would be REAL cool if there was a way to easily mark a show watched in BOTH user accounts if we happen to watch something together, which we do often as well...

 

I mean, I guess you can log out of one account, log into the other and mark it watched...but maybe adding a check box for which accounts to add it to the watched list...IDK...

  • Like 3
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I still wish there was a way to have a blank default login page where no users are shown or s electable right now i have to hide my users to make it work because i hide it my autologin feature does not work. Please make it so that the login page is blank and does not show any users information. that is a big security whole for those of use that make our servers reachable over the web we have to hide all the users and for all the apps that plays havoc with auto login..

Link to comment
e123enitan

Posted

I would like the ability to reset my guest account, an account created for family members who comes to visit, played state back to unwatched after the user logs off. 

 Yes- nice to have reset guess watched to unwatched would be nice feature to have

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e123enitan

Posted

I started a new thread yesterday regarding the inability of the access scheduler to kick users when their allotted end time has passed, is this bug on the to do list?

I support this idea if possible, to Kick out user when their alloted time expired or  prompt advising the user the schedule is coming to an end, and possible a count down notification that pop on the client screen.

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Untoten

Posted

This is great and all but I only came to emby because I can manage users without making them sign up on a third website.  This feature is great but please never make it mandatory like plex.

  • Like 4
Link to comment

I would like the ability to reset my guest account, an account created for family members who comes to visit, played state back to unwatched after the user logs off. 

 

Pleaseeeeeeeeee

Link to comment

I've been managing user accounts for awhile now, and as an 'admin' the one thing that is really bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be a way to see an actual activity log. There is the 'Recent Activity' log on the main server page which is not very useful, but I'm looking for an actual log with full information that I can access. Does this exist somewhere?

 

I can 't even see what people are watching in the Recent Activity log because it cuts everything off. "User has started watching A..." is all the information I seem to get.

Link to comment

K...I started using this feature recently and it's growing on me.  The wife and I can watch/track our seperate shows and if she watches somethign without me and I want ot watch it later, it doesn't disappear from Suggestions list.

 

BUT...it would be REAL cool if there was a way to easily mark a show watched in BOTH user accounts if we happen to watch something together, which we do often as well...

 

I mean, I guess you can log out of one account, log into the other and mark it watched...but maybe adding a check box for which accounts to add it to the watched list...IDK...

 

Been asking for this myself for quite a while now. (Apparently in Emby for WMC.)

 

See little value in multiple user accounts without this functionality. 80% of the time I watch TV with my wife... Can't imagine everyone's watching TV alone.

Link to comment
Happy2Play

Posted

I've been managing user accounts for awhile now, and as an 'admin' the one thing that is really bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be a way to see an actual activity log. There is the 'Recent Activity' log on the main server page which is not very useful, but I'm looking for an actual log with full information that I can access. Does this exist somewhere?

 

I can 't even see what people are watching in the Recent Activity log because it cuts everything off. "User has started watching A..." is all the information I seem to get.

@z0mbi

 

There is if you go to Reports and use the drop down and select Activities Log.  And you can export it to Excel.

Link to comment

I started a new thread yesterday regarding the inability of the access scheduler to kick users when their allotted end time has passed, is this bug on the to do list?

Still doesn't work 8 months later...:(

Link to comment

Still doesn't work 8 months later... :(

 

It currently doesn't interrupt playback but once the video stops it will prevent them from doing anything else or starting another video.

Link to comment
kevin.dual@gmail.com

Posted

I know I can restrict the content of a user by parental rating and I can block individual items by custom tags, but wouldn't it be easier if we could simply allow a user access to all items in a collection, then add or remove approved items to and from that collection? Just a though as I'm taking a break from tagging all the G and PG rated movies that my four year old has no interest in.

Link to comment

I've been managing user accounts for awhile now, and as an 'admin' the one thing that is really bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be a way to see an actual activity log. There is the 'Recent Activity' log on the main server page which is not very useful, but I'm looking for an actual log with full information that I can access. Does this exist somewhere?

 

I can 't even see what people are watching in the Recent Activity log because it cuts everything off. "User has started watching A..." is all the information I seem to get.

 

Make the page full screen and it shouldn't cut off the info.

Link to comment

It currently doesn't interrupt playback but once the video stops it will prevent them from doing anything else or starting another video.

I have created my own work around for this, I run Emby as a service on Windows 7 so I have created a scheduled task that runs a bat file to shutdown the server at specified times and another to restart the server 1 minute later. Doing it this way kicks everybody out but then lets those who are allowed continue watching after a brief break in transmission....:P 

Link to comment
iamspartacus

Posted

Has "Sync" been changed to "Download"?  Because that's what I see in my server Version 3.2.32.0.

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