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Plex

What Nexview does with your media server

Nexview runs perfectly well without a media server — the setup wizard does not even ask. Connect Plex, though, and three things arrive that change the everyday noticeably: the sign-in, knowing what is already there, and the watchlist.

First

Signing in with a Plex 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.

Screenshot: the Plex settings with the connected server
Connect once, then it stands. If the server happens to be off, signing in still works — it runs through Plex, not through your home connection.
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 film 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.

Screenshot: the Plex watchlist inside Nexview, as a card grid with badges for titles already downloaded
The same tiles as in the catalogue. The filter up top separates what is already there from what is still missing.
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

Plex only, and all of it optional

Nexview currently supports Plex only. Jellyfin and Emby are intended but not there — anybody running those can still use Nexview, just without these four things.

And all of it is optional. Without a media server you lose the Plex sign-in, the in library marker, the watchlist and the watched eye. The rest — discovery, requests, approvals, calendar, notifications — runs unchanged.

Nexview uses TMDB as its data source but is not from TMDB and is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. The screenshots come from a test installation; the accounts and requests shown in them are made up.

Nexview is published under the MIT licence. Radarr, Sonarr, Plex, Docker, Synology, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and JustWatch are trademarks of their respective owners and are named here for descriptive purposes only. Some of the icons on this page are based on Lucide (ISC licence) — copyright held in part by Cole Bemis 2013–2022 as part of Feather (MIT licence), otherwise by the Lucide contributors from 2022.