2 (possible cool) new feat. request

General Discussions
1

Hello everyone.
This is my first time posting anything on these forums, so I apologise if I did/said/wrote something that I shouldn’t.

First of all, since this is my first thread, I will say that I found about plex about 2 months ago, and been actively using it for around 3-4 weeks now. I’ll also want to congratulate the devs for this amazing platform that is Plex, since this is pretty much what I’ve wanted for years for my media collection organizing. Soooo… thank you.

Now, the purpose of this thread is to request 2 new features from the Devs, if they see it’s worthy of implementing

1- Movie Collection item labeling (Collection Item Sort Title if you prefer). I think it’s better to give an example or 2 on what this means.
Picture all the movies from Marvel (since 2000). You have those “stand-alones”, like the first spider-man trilogy, and the next 2 amazing spider-man, or the first incredible hulk. Then you have the Avengers Universe with such movies as Thor, Iron-Man, Avengers, Cap. America, etc.
What I did, was to put them all under a “Marvel” collection tag, but the Avengers Uni. ones have also a “Avengers” tag as well.
The problem is, when I go to the “Avengers” collection, I’d like for all movies to be in Avenger Universe chronological order, but their title does not allow for that.
So I then changed the “Sort Title” to Avengers 1, Avengers 2, Avengers 3, etc etc, so they would be chronological order, but then, on the home page of my movie collection, all those movies are under the letter ‘A’ (not in alphabetical order).

Now, what I’m requesting here, is a way of putting a “sort title” for each movie, in relation to a given collection. So for example, the movie “The Avengers”, is the 6th movie on Avengers Timeline, so it would be cool to have something like this:

  • Title: The Avengers
  • Sort Title: Avengers (Plex does not consider the “The” on sort titles)
  • Collection → Avengers → Sort Collection Item Title: Avengers 06

This way we could keep the movies in alphabetical order on the main movie screen, and also, on whatever order (in this case, timeline) we wanted when viewing a collection.
Another examples of universes: DC - Justice league (more movies to come), Lord of the Rings, Star Wars (more movies to come), Avatar (more movies to come), Divergent, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, just to name a few.
(Note: the “Collection Item Sort Title” name is probabbly pretty crappy, so if anyone has a better suggestion, please post it :slight_smile: )

2- Music Player. When working, or doing some random stuff at home (I work with computers), I’m always listening to music. Recently I migrated from the old winamp to youtube playlists, only because I did not wanted to always have to sync up my libs at work, and my home constantly and manually.
But I believe that Plex is the perfect platform for that.
So I suggest a small audio Windows App (or mac or linux if needed), kind of like the old winamp, but uses only our Audio libs from plex.
In this app you could add songs (it would upload to the server), create/delete/edit playlists, and obviously, play the music.
I know that Plex media player exists, but I’m suggesting something smaller, again, like the old winamp. A small app that sits on the corner of your screen, with the song title, timeline, play/pause/next/previous/stop buttons and, maybe, a secondary window with the chosen playlist songs.

Don’t know if any have been suggested before, of if the community or devs want something like this, but I hope they do :slight_smile:

Cheers

2

Collections are tedious and don’t make much sense to me so I don’t use them.

Better handling of Boxed Sets is often requested (for many years) and responded to with the sounds of crickets so most of us stick with the Sort Title option already available to us and employ clever library creation where necessary:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1342502/#Comment_1342502

In that link I describe a method I use for my ‘Sci-Fi Sets’ Movie Library wherein all my Sc-Fi Sets and Sequels (many) go into their own library and the Sort Title Field lines them up in the proper order regardless of their actual names, for instance: Prometheus (2012) follows Alien vs Predator (2004). It’s easy to use and set up and makes finding and playing them in order easy to do from any client or location.

As far as Music - Many people use the Playlist Feature in Plex - whatever that is - and I often see posts complaining about it (perhaps due to misuse - or something else) I have 3 main Libraries (Rock, Blues, Smooth Jazz) and shuffle random tunes within. Right now it’s a shuffle of The Smooth Jazz Library to serve as background noise while I concentrate on something else.

3

I understood what you were saying, and I’ve done the same with box sets (Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc). But that “technique” only works for movies with the same initial title. But the Avengers Universe filmology has different movie titles and therefore, that logic wouldn’t work.
I want, for example, to have the Iron Man movies under ‘I’ and Thor under ‘T’ (when sorted by name).
But my intention is when I go to Collections, have them sorted in a way that I want (which in this case is the universe timeline), and not by name. And like I said, changing the Sort Title to accomplish that, would mess up the alphabetical order on the movies home page.

Cheers

4

@david_ml_g@hotmail.com said:
I understood what you were saying, and I’ve done the same with box sets (Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc). But that “technique” only works for movies with the same initial title. But the Avengers Universe filmology has different movie titles and therefore, that logic wouldn’t work.

Why not? You can make: ACowPocolips (2000) sit right next to ZippeeDeeDooDah (1941) with the Sort Title Field if you want to. You just have to stop trying to use some features of Plex and stick instead to some others. Plex is an adventure in work arounds - and pretty soon you’ll discover which work arounds you need to use.

'You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need."

:slight_smile:

5

“Collections” wouldn’t be tedious if they were implemented properly. As in, the way users expect the feature to work and akin to the concept on most other Plex competitors. The problem is with “collections” currently as Plex has chosen to obstinately re-define the term so they can claim to have already implemented the feature. In its current bizarre and non-intuitive incarnation, yes it is “tedious” to the point of being useless.

6

@JuiceWSA said:

@david_ml_g@hotmail.com said:
I understood what you were saying, and I’ve done the same with box sets (Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc). But that “technique” only works for movies with the same initial title. But the Avengers Universe filmology has different movie titles and therefore, that logic wouldn’t work.

Why not? You can make: ACowPocolips (2000) sit right next to ZippeeDeeDooDah (1941) with the Sort Title Field if you want to. You just have to stop trying to use some features of Plex and stick instead to some others. Plex is an adventure in work arounds - and pretty soon you’ll discover which work arounds you need to use.

'You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need."

:slight_smile:

How?? Like I said, I’m pretty new to Plex, so maybe a missed something…
If I want to have this order of movies inside my Avenger Collection:
1- Captain America: The First Avenger
2- Iron Man
3- Iron Man 2
4- The Incredible Hulk
5- Thor
6- The Avengers
7- Iron Man 3
(etc etc)

and at the same time keep the alphabetical order of them when not in collection view (if I change the sort title to Avengers 1, 2, 3, etc, I lose that alphabetical order) how do I do that?

PS: love the quote :slight_smile:

@sremick said:
“Collections” wouldn’t be tedious if they were implemented properly. As in, the way users expect the feature to work and akin to the concept on most other Plex competitors. The problem is with “collections” currently as Plex has chosen to obstinately re-define the term so they can claim to have already implemented the feature. In its current bizarre and non-intuitive incarnation, yes it is “tedious” to the point of being useless.

Agreed. Collections should be a stand-alone feature, in my opinion, and not a search filter.
And since we’re on this, if it were me, instead of the current tag system, I’d implement a persistant naming system, meaning that even if you remove all the movies from that “tag”, the tag wouldn’t disappear, unless removed from a “Collection Management” menu.
But that’s just my personal preference

Cheers

7

@david_ml_g@hotmail.com said:
How?? Like I said, I’m pretty new to Plex, so maybe a missed something…

Follow the link - read the thread - see if you can ‘work around’ enough to make it work for you. I’m happy enough with the way it works for me, but I won’t argue the fact that it probably needs a lot of work to make other folks happy - a thing Plex doesn’t seem to want to do.

8

@JuiceWSA said:

@david_ml_g@hotmail.com said:
How?? Like I said, I’m pretty new to Plex, so maybe a missed something…

Follow the link - read the thread - see if you can ‘work around’ enough to make it work for you. I’m happy enough with the way it works for me, but I won’t argue the fact that it probably needs a lot of work to make other folks happy - a thing Plex doesn’t seem to want to do.

I think I’ll use some of it. But for timelines like the Avengers or Justice League, I’ll just number them.
Crossing fingers the devs find the time to upgrade and add new features to collection in the meantime :slight_smile:

9

Collections is indeed the most important missing feature

Now when I search for Harry potter , the movies are all scattered arround…
Is there no database grouping those movies together to see them as a whole?

In series I notices the same problem , ok there it shows up as one poster image, but when you click on it then you get each season poster (where you can click on) the problem is that the season number is not written on the poster…therefore you need to click on every season to find out which season it is…

For movies I would expect the same behavior: If there are 5 harry potters, the poster image should show the number of the sequel (Harry potter 3,Harry Potter 5) or better (Harry Potter 2003, Harry potter 2009)

Maybe plex could create a community feature where the community shows which movies are part of a sequel. That way it only needs to be grouped once by one person, and then it becomes active for the whole community.
In plex -> in a movie details -> show a litle icon “This is a sequal”, when you press on it you ask the user to give the title of another movie in this sequal and then press submit
This relation (New Movie, Other movie) is sent for inspection to plex
If plex agrees with the submitted relation, they press accept (and add a sequal number or year) and BANG the whole community gets this update next time their library re-updates

I also don’t think this would become a huge database, because sequels are actually quite rare when you compare them to the number of solo movies