Support for audiobooks

Feature Suggestions
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Until the Audiobooks section is officially supported I have a working fix for getting Audio Books into Plex that will work on phones and roku as well! Obviously it is not as good as official support but this is probably the best you are going to get for now. It is fast too, only takes a few min to get your book into Plex.

Items Needed:
MKVToolNix
Dummy Video Track (custom 10 min blank video) tiny file @ 124 KB
BulkFileChanger (optional)
Audiobook maker like Markable or Chapter and Verse (optional)

I use Markable to convert the audio files into an m4b using the “spoken podcast”’ settings in itunes import settings. But this is optional, separate mp3’s will work fine with these instructions.

  • Bring your imported file(s) into MKVToolNix. If you are using multiple audio files you will need to add them with “Append Files” option (right click in the files section)

  • Add the dummy video track I created. This track is 10 min long but we will use the “Stretch by” field to make it fit the audio.

  • You need to compute the stretch factor of the video to fit the audio. If you use my video track then use this formula ((Hours x 60 x 60)+(Minutes x 60)+Seconds)/(10 x 60). This will give you the scaling factor of the 10 min video file to the length of your audio book.

    474×110 5.26 KB

  • Select the video track from the “Tracks, chapters, tags and attachments” box and paste the computed value into the “Stretch by” field on the right.

  • “Start muxing” your file which will quickly produce an mkv file without re-encoding anything.

  • Edit the mkv file in BulkFileChanger or other program of your choice to set the creation date on the file to the proper year of the book. If you don’t do this now then Plex will import it with today’s date and cannot be changed without removing and re-adding the file later.

  • Place the video and cover art in a folder the way Plex likes. I prefer to use the “Home Videos” library type but you may choose to do it differently. Just make sure the library scanner is set to Personal Media

  • Edit the imported file in Plex to add descriptions

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