Music Video Library (Plus Shuffle Music Videos!)

This is a guide I set up for a few people who were asking how I set up my music video library. I figured some of you music video fanatics might get some use out of it too.

It’s kind of hacky and a bit fiddly to set up, but the library looks pretty good, contains the basic information plus some, and you can play music videos on shuffle! YAY!

First off, we have to make .nfo files for each of the music videos. Yeah, it’s a pain, but we are trying to make it look as pretty as possible, and this way we can add all kinds of information for each video.

I use ViMediaManager (Mac) to create the .nfo files. I’m sure there are similar programs for other operating systems out there. If anyone out there knows of some good ones, feel free to leave a reply with links.

This is the fiddly part and the instructions may vary according to the program you use. With ViMediaManager, in order to make an .nfo file for each video, we have to set up the videos on the hard drive as movies. That is, one music video in a folder by the same name, like this:

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This is the minimum amount of info we put in for each music video. If we know the exact date of release, we add that too, but if we don’t, we should put in a month and day. I use January 1st. This allows us to sort by date correctly in Plex:

This gives us an .nfo file alongside the music video:

Once you have all the .nfo files alongside the videos, add them to artist folders in your main Music Videos folder. If there’s two or more videos for one artist, put them all in the same Artist folder, like this:

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I keep all my music videos in one main folder so Plex can add the videos to it’s Music libraries. I let Plex know the path to that folder as directed here (under “Configure Local Media Assets Agent”): https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/205568377-Adding-Local-Artist-and-Music-Videos

That way Plex can use the folder for the Music libraries and we can use the folder for our special Music Videos library.

Now you can create a new Library called “Music Videos” (or whatever you want) with the kind as “Movies”. Add the Music Videos folder that we set up above, and set the library to use Plex Movie Scanner & XBMCnfoMoviesImporter to scan in the files.

You’ll get a relatively pretty library that looks like this:

With lots of details and descriptions if you want:

And you can set it to play videos one after another in shuffle mode! Party out of bounds!

I think it’s fairly useable until Plex adds a real Music Video library section.

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for making it better!

Congrats on your achievement but that is WAY too much effort. Right now I have my music videos in the same folder as my audio files with the m4v and m4a file names synchronized. When Plex is about to play a song, it should check to see if there’s a video file with the same name and play that instead.

I agree it should be easier, but I got tired of waiting.

Congratulations indeed!! Well thought out!
For my library, that is a massive effort, I will have to wait a little longer…
Thanks for posting this, at least I know there is an alternative should PLEX continue to make us wait for a solution.

Thanks. Trust me, it’s a massive effort for me as well. I’ve only got a small subset done but I work on it from time to time.

Make sure to like the top post. I’m hoping some sympathetic Plex programmers will read this and decide to give us a simpler method.

I’ll try your approach. It looks a little bit cumbersome, but since I have few music videos, it’s totally doable.

Obviously all of this is Plex’s fault. They should implement a reasonable and simple method to create a music videos library.

Anyone know a good .nfo file creator for Windows that I can make them in a format Plex will understand? Or are .nfo files always structured the same?

@whites7 said:
Anyone know a good .nfo file creator for Windows that I can make them in a format Plex will understand? Or are .nfo files always structured the same?

Ember Media Manager should do the trick.

@OttoKerner said:
Ember Media Manager should do the trick.

Thanks…let the learning curve begin

First off, thanks for this discovery/hack. I’m likely going to do this for my trailer collection (now several thousand of 'em) so that they can play at random. But I’m curious regarding the .NFO file. Is this really necessary or will embedded tags work as well (assuming H.264 .m4v files are used)?

The .NFO files are indeed necessary because we are relying on XBMCnfoMoviesImporter to import the metadata.

At first a wanna thank you, awesome job!

I already have nfos named after the video, but i have the problem that after the scanning, the xbmcnfo agent does not recognize the artist correctly. e.g. “Aaliyah More Than a Woman” is the name of the video after scanning…

Could you please post an example nfo for a video? i would guess that they simply have an other structure, despite i am also migrating from xbmc / kodi.

Would be great for me to get this to work correctly!
Thx in advance!

Edit:
Forget it, i was totally on the wrong track here… Forgot that we are using the MOVIE Scanner, and a Movie certainly does not have an Artist.

Seems like the Music Video feature is really half baked.

(1) Plex doesn’t use the video’s embedded data. Since my file names are
ARTIST - YEAR - ALBUM - TRACKNUMBER - TRACKNAME
I can’t tell which video is which when looking at a grid view.

(2) When I hit shuffle, none on the videos ever come up. It would be great if when Plex was shuffling your music, if it sees a video with the same file name, it plays that instead.

I honestly don’t want to mess with NFO files or other busy work. iTunes can shuffle music videos so why can’t Plex?

@rtm135 I agree. It’s a hassle to use NFO files. I’m just showing people what I do. I don’t think it’s a decent solution at all. I’d rather have Plex actually have a working music video shuffle mode, and more robust features for music videos in general.

@suki2288 I’m sorry, I missed your post completely. Yeah, we are limited to the movie scanner so it’s a rough hack at best.

Here is one of my NFOs anyway. As you can see, I use the “Artist: Title” format to give it at least a little semblance of something pretty.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <movie>
      <title>Blondie: Denis</title>
      <sorttitle>Blondie: Denis</sorttitle>
      <originaltitle>Blondie: Denis</originaltitle>
      <year>1977</year>
      <releasedate>1977-01-01</releasedate>
      <fileinfo>
        <streamdetails>
          <video>
            <codec>MPEG Video</codec>
            <width>720</width>
            <height>480</height>
            <aspect>1.5</aspect>
            <duration>2</duration>
            <durationinseconds>134</durationinseconds>
            <scantype>Interlaced</scantype>
            <bitdepth>8</bitdepth>
            <language code="en">English</language>
          </video>
          <audio>
            <codec>PCM</codec>
            <channels>2</channels>
            <language code="en">English</language>
            <bitratemode>CBR</bitratemode>
          </audio>
          <audio>
            <codec>AC3</codec>
            <channels>2</channels>
            <language code="en">English</language>
            <bitrate>256</bitrate>
            <bitratemode>CBR</bitratemode>
            <size>4293248</size>
          </audio>
        </streamdetails>
      </fileinfo>
    </movie>

@tikilab Have you tried making a dedicated Music Video library? I’ve had some success with it and didn’t have to make any NFO files.

To make things work, I did the following:

(1) Made sure all of my music videos were in an MP4 container.

(2) Made sure the file names of the MP4s were identical to their MP3 counterparts and in the same folders as the MP3’s.

(3) Used MusicBrainz Picard to embed the necessary MP4 metadata.

(4) Used MP3tag to check the embedded metadata and manually fill in any blanks

(5) When everything looked good, created an “Other Videos” library that pointed to my Music folder.

So far the results have been promising, but not 100%. I’ve run into an issue where the Plex Video Scanner misreads some of the embedded metadata (usually the YEAR field) which results in some sorting issues. It seems to be affecting 5-10% of my library and I haven’t been able to determine the cause. I asked the Plex Ninjas to look at it and their reply was less than encouraging…

forums.plex.tv/discussion/272092/personal-videos-using-embedded-metadata-inconsistently

@rtm135

I do have a dedicated Music Video library! That’s what the nfo files are for.

(1) Made sure all of my music videos were in an MP4 container.

Ahh… I really don’t want to do this. I have lots of videos in many different formats and I don’t want to spend the time to convert them or potentially lose any quality. Playing many different formats is one of the features I like about Plex.

(2) Made sure the file names of the MP4s were identical to their MP3 counterparts and in the same folders as the MP3’s.

Some of my music videos don’t have an audio counterpart. Some videos have two different versions as well.

My music video library is quite large and it wouldn’t fit on the same hard drive that holds my music.

I also use iTunes and let it organize my music, which works extremely well for me, so I don’t want to put anything in there to confuse it.

(Please know I’m not posting these reasons to shut you down. I just want the developers to know why such a solution wouldn’t work for me.)

I just have mine in a movie style setting. I am not too bothered about not having any of the metadata as I have just labeled the videos as artist then title. When I play the videos it is mostly on random play. if i do play one at a time you can still read the artist and title.

I just wanted to mention, the IMDB is now listing music videos as films with “short, music” as the genre, and there are quite a few entries (I encourage you to add more to IMDB if you’ve got the info). For instance, Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics is here:

Looks like a great opportunity to integrate this data into Plex somehow. Maybe with a new Music Video scanner?