Option to manually hide individual movie, show, or episode per user

[guynamedbilly 13]

It'd be nice if there was an option to hide individual library items depending on the user.

Use case would be two people using the same library and one of them does not like violent movies and images.  They could hide those from appearing when they browse the library.

I guess it would also need a menu in the server management to manage hidden items so you could restore them later if needed.

[GrimReaper 3289]

That is already achievable by Tag-based access control, "Block items with these tags" mode. 

Settings>Users tab, edit any user, Parental Control tab. 

[guynamedbilly 13]

That's ok for me as the admin.  Not so useful for my technical illiterate sister.  A simple hide button would be much easier.

[Happy2Play 8281]

Or even via custom parental rating.

But either method will require individual user accounts.  Also if the user is doing this it would require them to have manage server rights as they would be editing metadata.  Otherwise it would fall on the admin to do all of this for the user.

[guynamedbilly 13]

8 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

But either method will require individual user accounts.  Also if the user is doing this it would require them to have manage server rights as they would be editing metadata.  Otherwise it would fall on the admin to do all of this for the user.

I don't understand this part.  With the way libraries are organized now via user accounts, there would appear to be some obfuscated filtering happening.  Why couldn't this be filtered behind the scenes also and not require editing metadata? It would be data applied to the user profile.

[GrimReaper 3289]

I could see this being feasible similar as Favorites are, with hidden item being "copied" in the 'Hidden items' tab and with "isHidden=Yes" property resulting in that item simply NOT being displayed in other library views. Downside is that tab scroller is already pretty filled, with even some more pertinent items requiring spot there, so don't know how realistic it would be to expect Hidden items tab to find place there. 

Edited May 24, 2022 by GrimReaper

[Happy2Play 8281]

30 minutes ago, guynamedbilly said:

I don't understand this part.  With the way libraries are organized now via user accounts, there would appear to be some obfuscated filtering happening.  Why couldn't this be filtered behind the scenes also and not require editing metadata? It would be data applied to the user profile.

Well new database column and api updates would need to be added to accommodate an option like this if existing methods are not used.

10 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

I could see this being feasible similar as Favorites are, with hidden item being "copied" in the 'Hidden items' tab and with "isHidden=Yes" property resulting in that item simply NOT being displayed in other library views. Downside is that tab scroller is already pretty filled, with even some more pertinent items requiring spot there, so don't know how realistic it would be to expect Hidden items tab to find place there. 

But yes I would assume a option like this would only exist in the context menu to hide a item.  Only way I see this working would be a filter that could be disabled to show all.

[Gilgamesh_48 943]

I read through this thread and I must admit that the idea of restricting a user (or users) from certain movies/TV shows/music files or even home videos while allowing access to others without mucking with the ratings directly is something I explored in the past. The best solution that anyone came up with was tags but tagging a lot of movies is a tedious propitiation at best. The final solution that was mostly agreed would be best is using collections and tagging collections and using the tags to grant/deny access to certain groups of media.

This seemed ideal and not too hard to implement BUT Emby, at least at that time, did not support/respect tags on collections.

I do not know if Emby plans to support (or already has support for) tags on collections or any such group tagging scenario in the future but my need for it has diminished quite a bit. I still think that the ability to filter collections by tags is a good idea but there are potentially serious issues like:
What happens if a collection is tagged to not display for a particular user and that user uses a view that does not display collections?

There are a LOT of other issues but I still believe that tags+collections+user restrictions is the way that this problem can be solved.

[pwhodges 1527]

Another approach is to divide the library into multiple folders - the users can then be given access to some folders and not others.

Paul

[Gilgamesh_48 943]

4 hours ago, pwhodges said:

Another approach is to divide the library into multiple folders - the users can then be given access to some folders and not others.

Paul

That would work if there was no overlap. The following scenario is not easily covered by simple library restrictions:
I have movies A, B, C, D, E,F
I have users 1, 2, 3
I want to give 1 access to A,B,C and deny access to D,E,F
While 2 gets B,C,D and denied A,E,F
And 3 Gets C,D,E with A,B,F denied.

For that using libraries either requires a lot of library overlap which is not well supported by Emby and in some cases the number of libraries would actually exceed the number of movies involved.
Collections are designed so that a movie can appear in multiple collections so, if access to each collection could be tag controlled,, the setup for the allowing/denying access becomes quite simple and changing access is as simple as adding/removing movies from a given collection. The ability to nest collections would also help dramatically.

At least the collection idea seems pretty simple to me but I also see that it could get complex, possibly too complex, very quickly and what seems "easy" or "straight forward" or even "trivial" to me could easily become closer to something like mathematician's "three body problem" that looks on first blush almost trivial but turns out to be extremely difficult or impossible to to solve.

Of course, a lot of times, Emby has done the impossible and the "three body problem" was recently mostly solved using the "Drunkard's walk" tool from "map theory." Maybe Emby needs to use a more practical approach by using liberal amounts of a liquid analgesic from Kentucky.  

[guynamedbilly 13]

The idea was based on ease of use.  I can assure you that if someone wants to hide a particular movie and it requires me as the admin to configure multiple libraries and collections et al, then I'll just say tough lol.

In the meantime I guess I'll see if the tag solution would work.

Edited May 25, 2022 by guynamedbilly

[Icedkoughiiee 0]

I do not get the option for parental controls. Where can I find it?

 

Edit: Nevermind

Edited February 17, 2023 by Icedkoughiiee