Media server
Signing in with a media-server account
Anybody who has access to your library anyway signs in with their Plex account, no second password, no second invitation.
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Media server
Your Plex watchlist, in here
Whatever you have put on your Plex watchlist appears under Profile → Manage watchlist as the same tiles you know from the catalogue, with the same badges, including already downloaded and 4K.
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Media servers
What Nexview does with your media server
Nexview runs perfectly well without a media server, the setup wizard does not even ask. Connect one, though, Plex, Jellyfin or Emby, several at once if you like, and three things arrive that change daily life noticeably: signing in, knowing what is already there, and (with Plex) the watchlist.
All three
Plex, Jellyfin and Emby: at the same time
Not “one of them”, but all of them side by side. That is not a gimmick; it answers two situations that come up constantly in real households.
Moving house takes months. Nobody switches from Plex to Jellyfin in one evening: first one person moves, then the kids, then eventually the television in the living room. Both run during that time, and Nexview does not force anyone to decide up front.
And tastes differ. One likes the Plex app on the TV, another wants nothing that phones home, and Emby runs best on the old tablet. Everyone signs in with the account they already have.
The library comparison adds them up. “Already in the library” is true as soon as any connected server carries the title. That is the whole point of the comparison: stopping somebody from downloading a second time what is long since here, and that must not depend on which server they happen to watch through.
The differences
What is different where
Plex signs in through plex.tv, your Plex password never reaches Nexview. Alone of the three, Plex has a watchlist, and it appears in Nexview as a section of its own.
Jellyfin and Emby have no broker flow: here you enter the server's address, username and password. Neither has a watchlist, so Nexview does not offer the section at all, rather than showing a tick that cannot do anything.
And one quirk that cost real work: Emby does not answer the question “who am I”. What Plex and Jellyfin will tell you at any time simply does not exist there, measured against version 4.9.5.0, the address returns a server error. So Nexview remembers the account number at sign-in; without it neither the library can be read nor an account linked.
First
Signing in with a media-server account
Anybody who has access to your library anyway signs in with their Plex account, no second password, no second invitation.
It is checked against your server's own identifier. A stranger's Plex account with no relation to your server does not get in.
The connection itself is a one-off: sign in, pick your own server from the list, done. Nexview remembers the first address the server actually answers on, the local one comes first but is not always reachable from inside a container. Silently storing the wrong one would surface months later.
That makes a mail server dispensable. By default Nexview creates an account for every unknown Plex sign-in, with the role you set as the default, and without automatic approval. Anybody with access to your library is in, with no invitation and no confirmation mail. If you would rather not have that, switch the import off in the settings; then invitations apply again.
And if you already have people on the server, you bring them across in one go. Nexview asks Plex, Jellyfin or Emby for its accounts and shows them as a list. You tick whoever you want, and for each row you decide: a new account, or a link to one that already exists. Nothing is preselected. Those people then sign in with the credentials they already use, with no password and no e-mail address. For Jellyfin and Emby this is the only workable route: a sign-in alone creates no account there, because neither knows an e-mail address for an account.
There is a third way in as well: a sign-in service you already run, Authentik, Keycloak, Pocket ID or Google. All three ways stand side by side and none replaces another; in full on the Sign-in page.
Second
It knows what is already there
Nexview reads what sits in your library and so also spots titles that never came through Radarr or Sonarr, copied by hand, part of a collection predating the arr setup, however it happened.
Such titles show as in library and cannot be requested a second time. Without that, the most annoying case is guaranteed: somebody requests a movie that has been on the disk for years.
The sync runs hourly in the background; the settings show how many titles are indexed and when it last ran. A button triggers it at once, and reports the error in plain words if it fails.
Third
Your Plex watchlist, in here
Whatever you have put on your Plex watchlist appears under Profile → Manage watchlist as the same tiles you know from the catalogue, with the same badges, including already downloaded and 4K.
A filter separates everything from not here yet. That second list is the reason the page exists: it shows what you have marked but not yet fetched.
A click opens the usual request dialog. Quota, approval, block list and age limit apply there exactly as everywhere else.
Nothing happens on its own. No background sync that requests of its own accord, every title takes a click. An administrator has to enable the feature in the first place; it is off by default.
Fourth
And what you have already seen
Titles you have already watched on the media server carry an eye, and everybody sees only their own.
For a long time that was reliable for one account only: the one whose Plex access sat in the settings. Everybody else was read from the playback history, which Plex caps at around 500 entries, and which never hears about titles ticked off by hand.
Today every Plex sign-in stores that person's own access, and the sync reads the complete state from the library counters. Plex has the last word, in both directions: remove the checkmark there and the eye disappears here. Except for titles that have left the library, deleting a file does not undo having watched it.
Honestly
All of this is optional
And all of it is optional. Without a media server you lose signing in with a media-server account, the in library marker, the watchlist and the watched eye. The rest, discovery, requests, approvals, calendar, notifications, runs unchanged.