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Parental Control Improvements


xe`

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There are a number of parental control suggestions in this subforum but many are not described well enough or dont have specific examples to test against.

I am going to use this thread (assuming it doesnt auto lock) to note my issues with examples as I travel this road and hopefully others can contribute too.

Currently parental control can control:

  • Maximum allowed parental rating
  • Block items with no or unrecognised rating information
  • Restrict Items With Tags
  • Create an access schedule to limit access to certain hours

Maximum allowed parental rating is powerful but full of exceptions and issues

Example

Is not really what most would call generally suitable.

Meanwhile the Adams family cartoon is clearly for children and the same rating

You can filter out Horror which would remove Jaws and not The Adams Family (I chose this example carefully as it is quite possible the Adams family would get the Horror tag)

Unfortunately this would also impact the Toy Story short movie

And there within lies the problem, almost no tags have no direct relation to how age appropriate the content is.

Solution: The only solution would be to be able to combine controls so that you can effectively say "Allow Horror Catagory only when Rating lower than GB-PG non inclusive"

 

Another example of where combination would be useful:

This is a GB-U but there is no way its of interest to most small children.

Solution: "If category War and History then block". Another would be "If move older than 1960 and not Studio Disney then block"

 

Sometime you may just want to say "Block this movie or show" or Vice versa "Allow this movie or show"

You may also want to ban on adult Keywords to cover things like "Porn, Sex etc"

 

You can see that as soon as you have this kind of power then you can basically build quite complex "Age Appropriate" filters and I would suggest that parents would probably be keen to contribute to this and share them. This is a community waiting to happen.

 

I have many more ideas but I will wait to gauge interest.

 

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Hi.  We already have a solution to that problem.  It is called "Custom Rating".  In your example, you would change the custom rating of Jaws and The Addams Family to be what you believe they should be and parental controls will do exactly what you want.

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Also, "laundry list" type feature requests are very hard to track since they contain multiple things with multiple possible answers.  So it is best to limit each post to one specific feature.

Thanks.

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Understood. I will pare it right down.

Custom rating helps in very specific cases but require so much manual effort it is not practically useful to solve the actual problem.

In the example above, I require to Block All movies with category Horror and rating PG or above in one step covering current and future additions.

You can see how much just-in-time work this would require to keep the content away from children and even then there would be a period where it would be available.

 

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13 minutes ago, xe` said:

In the example above, I require to Block All movies with category Horror and rating PG or above in one step covering current and future additions.

I would contend that "broad stroke" is going to have exceptions as well which will then cause you to have to go in and make specific edits of some kind to adjust to them.

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Yes this is for sure an imperfect solution to an imperfect problem but remember when it comes to children a "better safe than sorry" option should always win.

Given this, an automatic solution that sometimes blocks content is a small price to pay to reduce the risk of exposing inappropriate material.

Surely that makes sense?

 

 

 

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What you can do now is use the filtering system to get a list of these types of movies like the HORROR & PG movie and then edit them using the custom rating as ebr mentioned.

You could also refer to a couple of external sites similar to:

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/jaws

https://parentpreviews.com/movie-reviews/jaws

https://dove.org/?s=Jaws

https://kids-in-mind.com/search-desktop.htm?fwp_keyword=jaws

Some have limited ratings on older movies.  What's neat is the breakdown by violence and other categories so you can do your own ratings based on this. If these sites had more reviews it could make for an interesting plugin that could download ratings for movies in your libs and then set a custom ratings or tags based on your criteria such as Violence4, Sex3, Language3, DDS3 (Drinking, Drugs, Smoking) for Jaws using the info provided.  You could then use filters for tags in setup of children as well.

For the most part the ratings that are provided are pretty good so Emby does a good job using that info.

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That is very interesting. I knew that IMDB had a parental review section but I was unaware of any sources that actually had alternate ratings systems that potentially could be used to compliment (correct) the official country specific rating.

However I still maintain that as a parent there is value in me being able to decide to universally block content based on compounded values e.g. category+rating, keyword+rating, age+catagory-studio.

Certainly other things can also be done but I see no downside "conceptually" with also having this power.

 

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Understood. It's possible to do in the future but would require the ability to create rules and filter sets with AND OR type logic which can get complicated fast.  What could maybe be a lot easier and help you would be another filter section like TAGS but using category.  That would be a step in this direction as you could select PG-13 but not allow horror for example.

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This thread have given me some ideas how to do this on my own using offline processing and leveraging the custom rating feature but it will be a kludge.

I would be keen to discuss realistic options if anyone thinks this topic has enough merit but it seems so far at least everything on the table is non trivial and would need serious dev buy in which is never an easy thing to inspire.

Thanks everyone for the feedback

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Deathsquirrel

Just to add to the suggestions, look at combining parental ratings with library permissions.  Put Jaws and The Addams Family in separate folders.  Add those folders to the same library but give your younger users permissions to the folder that contains the ones you want them to see but not to the folders containing stuff they shouldn't see or wouldn't want to watch.

I have the following movie folders on my NAS which are added to my Movies library:

  • \SHARE\Movies
  • \SHARE\Movies User 1
  • \SHARE\Movies User 2
  • \SHARE\Movies User 3

All users have access to \Movies and to their own folder.  Only the admin account is added to all four folders.  I put anything that's both generally acceptable to people of an appropriate age and of interest to at least a couple users in the Movies folder.  Things that are either restricted because only one person will ever watch them or because they are unsuitable for any other users due to content, go in the user folders.  On top of that I have parental controls by rating and then handle exceptions with a custom rating when needed.

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Deathsquirrel thanks for taking the time to reply to me. I have pondered this route and whilst it looks easy enough to setup it is potentially generates as much manual effort as using custom Emby ratings.

My prime focus here is to make this as automatic as possible both because I am very busy but also I am only human and anything manual means I will make mistakes. I especially cant guarantee I will have time each and every time this is needed so I worry my tardiness leaves a big window for content access which essentially makes the whole process far less useful. To be clear though I am realistic I know any solution will be imperfect and that is OK since in most cases I would hope it will work.

 

After reading back through the thread I took the time to look at IMDB again and I quickly realised it has info that I can potentially use programmatically that I have never considered before.

For example:

Jaws

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/parentalguide

  • Sex & Nudity: Mild                 
  • Violence & Gore: Severe           
  • Profanity: Moderate
  • Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking: Mild
  • Frightening & Intense Scenes: Severe


The Addams Family (2019 cartoon)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1620981/parentalguide

  • Sex & Nudity: None                    
  • Violence & Gore: Mild            
  • Profanity: None   
  • Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking: Mild
  • Frightening & Intense Scenes: Mild


Toy Story of Terror!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2446040/parentalguide

  • Sex & Nudity: None                    
  • Violence & Gore: Mild            
  • Profanity: None   
  • Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking: None
  • Frightening & Intense Scenes: Mild

 

The Dam Busters (1955)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/parentalguide

  • Sex & Nudity: None                    
  • Violence & Gore: None               
  • Profanity: Mild                   
  • Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking: None    
  • Frightening & Intense Scene: None

 

On top of this since it is a public voting system each has a score. For example Jaws "Violence & Gore: Severe" is actually "None: 2, Mild: 7, Moderate:104,  Severe: 124".

I do not know if Emby can scrape this info or if it is even available via the API but content wise it looks trivial to develop a scheme that could rerate content.

I am no coder but I know enough to kludge a screen scrape based on IMDB ID (which we already know) and i could then modify the rating in a nfo. I would much rather not roll my own solution though since only I would benefit from that.

In theory at least does anyone know if Emby can see this info with current API calls?

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I went down this path myself several years ago when my children, nieces and nephews were young.  In the end I found the general rating to be pretty good overall indication of the info I scraped which you listed above.  I was using a combination of a lot of sites, some I mentioned above in other posts.

The amount of movies that I generated new ratings for weren't many of 10K+ movies.  Then I got questions why X movie wasn't available to kids accounts when the movie was PG, etc...

I abandoned this approach and just had parents tell me what rating to use for each of their kids.  When you get down to it the actual published rating of movies/shows is actually well done.  That's kind of the point of the ratings and why these other services never really took off.

I personally feel the ratings assigned to movies are pretty good but if Emby allowed flags of categories like it can tags then that could help alot.  For example no matter rating your kids don't get horror movies, etc.  That would eliminate movies like Jaws.

With that said here's a good personal story.  Jaws came out in 75 and I was 9 years old.  My family was on vacation in Wild Wood, NJ at the beach.  Everywhere you looked everything was jaws from T-shirts to towels to billboards, etc.  I talked my family into seeing it day 2 of vacation.  Rest of the vacation my parents didn't go into the water but you couldn't get me out.  We saw that movie 3 different times on vacation as I loved it even at 9.  So the moral is the ratings are a "general" expression of what's appropriate. I also went and seen other box office movies with my dad such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Wicker Man, The Omen, Carrie, The Hills Have Eyes, The Exorcist, Halloween (couldn't get Mom to see any of them).  

Some kids react to things differently.  One child like me is not affected while another could be totally freaked out by that type of movie especially on vacation at the beach.  Scary movies just never bothered me even at a young age.  My daughter on the other hand in her 20s still won't watch ET as that freaked her out when she was little (with help from Dad). LOL

Ratings plus category filtering would go a long way in this for parental control without adding a lot of additional baggage to the server.  Custom ratings are still available for the odd movie that would still get past the cat/rating filter.  So while additional features would be great, having category filters listed under parental control would be great and a big help.

Just my personal 2 cents.

Edited by cayars
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Spaceboy

The folder approach as described by Deathsquirrel is the best balance of effort and function. It the one I use

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10 hours ago, xe` said:

...but I know enough to kludge a screen scrape based on IMDB ID...

Screen scraping..

6K5eL10.png

https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/general-information/can-i-use-imdb-data-in-my-software/G5JTRESSHJBBHTGX#

That section above just covers non-commercial personal use. It forbids scraping.

For commercial use there is a different route that includes deposits of large(read as enormous) sums of cash. This is why Emby isn't doing any of the above and does not pursue things of this nature.

mUlna6U.png

 

Edited by speechles
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Deathsquirrel
12 hours ago, xe` said:

Deathsquirrel thanks for taking the time to reply to me. I have pondered this route and whilst it looks easy enough to setup it is potentially generates as much manual effort as using custom Emby ratings.

As your collection grows you're going to want to segment it anyway just for the sake of easy browsing.  Honestly the folder-based approach is more for that than the ratings.  I did use it for 'PG' comedies from the 80s when my kids were small though.  As @cayars said, the ratings system for movies is generally pretty solid but I've noticed that PG covered a pretty darn broad range of nudity and language if it was a comedy in the 80s.

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Taking the temperature of the thread.

Even though this is the "feature requests" forum the majority of responses and general tone fall clearly into either the "its good enough as-is" camp or "do it manually yourself outside Emby".

There have been a couple of good suggestions that make me confident I can now solve this problem just for me but obviously that doesn't help anyone else or improve Emby.

Since this never was a support thread we could just leave it as a nice idea but no interest or should we carry on?

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Spaceboy

Nothing wrong with leaving the feature request for enhancements but I think you have to be realistic about when it might get worked on given the frankly huge list of outstanding requests and your acknowledgement that what is there suffices for the most part.

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One unanswered question; can anyone say if the current Emby lookups have access to the IMDB parental data i.e. is it in any of the API feeds. My googling has not been fruitful.

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Thanks for the follow ups. I have done some research and unfortunately I am now sadly confident that whilst parents are freely submitting votes to IMDB the info gets immediately protected behind the commercial AUP making it proprietary.

OMDB etc do not seem to help.

I think I have now exhausted my knowledge on thistopic  but am happy to assist if we want to "gear up" to look deeper but as a solo effort that is me at the point where it "works for me" and "I cant see a way I can do similar for Emby community users".

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  • 11 months later...
Pseudomax

I hope you don't mind me resurrecting this thread...

 

Can I add a further option that I think would be very simple and effective (albeit with some mild additional interaction with your kids) and simply only play the movie with a PIN if a predetermined rating is not met? (Essentially the same as the BBC iPlayer approach)

Edited by Pseudomax
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