Ability to disable automatic screenshot grab for videos to prevent spoilers

Feature Suggestions
1

I have a WMC server setup for recording sporting events that I can watch on the road using Plex. Frustratingly, Plex has a tendency to pull a screenshot from the end of games and give away the score. Right now I’m manually creating a dummy .jpg that matches the video file name, but it would be nice if I could disable the screenshot altogether for certain folders, or at least direct it to pull from the first 30 seconds or so of video.

2

There is a work around for this. Some custom skins for PHT has option to disable cover and description for unwatched items.

3

Voted. Personally I’ve made a small batch file which copies a fixed jpg to filename.jpg and filename-fanart.jpg for all video files in my “sports” directory:

for %%a in (*.mp4 *.mkv) do ( copy /y background.jpg %%~na.jpg copy /y background.jpg %%~na-fanart.jpg )

So I just double-click on that bat file for each time I drop some new files in that folder. This will cause Plex to only show the background.jpg image for each video. Not elegant though…

4

I’m doing the same thing. The other problem I’m running into just recently is the channel I’m recording has switched from broadcasting in 1080i to 720p. This means Plex no longer gives me the options of 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, or 20 Mbps. The problem is that it is a 20Mbps stream, so I can either stream 1.5 Mbps at 480p, or “Original” which tries to match the stream’s original bitrate which is above that of the internet upload speed.

5

See also this longish thread with many pleas to the plex team to implement such an unbelievably simple fix - just put an option at the library level to not generate the screenshot/thumbnail and instead use a generic video icon.

It really would be so easy to implement and you guys cannot imagine how much heartache you would be ameliorating.

1 Like
6

There’s also a very long thread about customers begging Plex to implement a better bitrate setting but nothing has changed yet :frowning:

7

I want this desperately.

8

I spend hours - really! - each race weekend replacing poster and background images for every free practice, qualifying session, press conference, race, podium, and post-race show for MotoGP, World Superbike (WSBK), Isle Of Man TT (IOM), and MotoAmerica. Typically, there are 15 videos for MotoGP, 6 (minimum) for WSBK, dozens for IOM, and 4 or so for MotoAmerica. Replacing the spoiler images requires me to open the editor, cover the edit window, click poster-add new-(find file)-image-okay then background-add new-(find file)-image-okay then click General and Save for every file! Duplicate twice that if I want to update another of my 3 Plex servers. That’s a lot of aggravation for my carpal tunnel condition. Over the years, your users have made many feature requests to eliminate spoilers.

There are two easy (I hope) ways to fix this:

  1. A feature that allows the user to disable automatic thumbnail generation for an entire library.

  2. A feature that allows the user to designate a default poster and background for an entire library. Even just for the folder would save a lot of work, but name duplication would not work in this case, as 12-18 files within a single folder are named like: MotoGP.2018.Round01.Qatar.FP1.web-rip.x264.720p.English.mp4; MotoGP.2018.Round01.Qatar.Post-Qualification.PC.web-rip.x264.720p.English.mp4; MotoGP.2018.Round01.Qatar.Race.BTSportHD.1080p.English.mkv; Moto2.2018.Round01.Qatar.Race.SkySports.SD.DVR.English.ts

Your subscribers would be most grateful!

Dee

10

2021 clean-up: duplicate