Auto Movie Collections

Feature Suggestions
41

You must not be very imaginative, if you cannot think of a reason. You seriously want people to ceate collections for every movie series? That might well be hundreds of collections, each with just a few movies. That wouldn't help navigation or improve the 10-ft view of your library in any way. All it'd do is mess up the collections view and create lots of manual labor for all users wanting this.

XBMC has a plug-in that automates this grouping, so if you have movies that the scraper determines is in a series (e.g. Iron Man), they get grouped together and only one image is shown when browsing movies. It really helps clean things up, and above all, it's an automatic process. I don't care at all what you can do by manually editing things, I just don't have time or desire to do so.

You completely misunderstood my post.  If you use the TMDB agent, a collection is already created for each movie series.  The option has been there for some time and uses the same data as XBMC because the source in TMDB is the same.  Some of those collections are useless because the data in TMDB is user-generated.  Not the issue of this thread, even though the name would imply it.

The core of the discussion is whether, in the All Movies view, the movies in a collection should be grouped under one icon by default.  This would mean only one icon for Iron Man movies instead of 3.  I support that as an option but not as the default, largely because the only source of the data happens to be pretty bad  a good deal of the time.  Since we don't have flattening for TV shows (meaning when there's only one season of a show on a server, clicking on a show should not show you Season 1 but the actual episodes)  I would not assume it would come into play here.  That means the hundreds of collections auto-created under the current agent might result in most collections consisting of one movie.  This means that for all of those, the list is not shortened and we've introduced an extra level to click through for watching a single movie.

Development requests are best broken into separate issues:

  • Should the scraper add collection info (though several are discussing this, it's already there in the TMDB agent and has been for a while)?
  • Should there be a view that groups collections under a single icon?  This does not exist in Plex and would likely mean that any collection of any size would result in an icon in the list that had to be clicked through to get a list (of even one) movies.
  • Should this view be the default (for All Movies)?

The first question keeps being asked in spite of its existence.  The second is valid and I agree that there might be some people that would prefer it.  I think it would be of limited utility because of bad data in TMDB on series.  Specifically, there are many "series" in TMDB that are built to include extras and non-theatrical items that would not generally be considered movies in Plex.  This means that a lot of collections of only 1 movie would be created, potentially making the navigation more cumbersome instead of less.

So you can be happy that collections data is automated, or you can do it yourself.  But you can't complain about it not being there or say that it's too hard if you choose to maintain it yourself.

Let me give an example.  Megamind is in TMDB and has a collection listed.  The collection consists of one movie (Megamind) and one extra from the DVD/Blu-Ray release.  This would, if the navigation is consistent from all previous iterations of Plex, result in a Megamind Collection icon in the movies list.  To get to watch Megamind, you would have to navigate to the collection, click on it, select the (likely only) one movie that you had and then click on it to play it in some way.  You could argue that collections of only one movie on the server should be flattened, but that has not happened with TV shows, so it is not terribly likely to be done here.  

If that view weren't the default one, I have no problem whatsoever in it being developed.    My only issue is with the third question above.  I don't agree that grouping movies into collections should be the default view.  This is largely because the automated collections data is so bad.  Since movies can be in multiple collections for valid reasons, it also introduces the possibility of considerably longer queries to build the list.  Again, acceptable if you choose that view explicitly but not as a default.

42

Movies without a collection listed could just as easily be listed on the default list view and then have folders for those listed as collections. Code is wonderful in that you can adapt it to do anything. A simple true false statement could easily determine whether a collection was listed or not and then put them in folders if they were.

43

XBMC doesn't seem to have an issue with Movies that are part of a collection but are the only one in the library. In that cae it shows the one movie and only flattens when there are more than one movie present in that collection.

44

XBMC doesn't seem to have an issue with Movies that are part of a collection but are the only one in the library. In that cae it shows the one movie and only flattens when there are more than one movie present in that collection.

XBMC doesn't separate the client and server.  There the display of collections is completely managed in the skin.  Because of the number of low-power clients for Plex, the same approach is not possible.  You can't have a Roku or AppleTV making complex decisions about how to display items without a very severe performance penalty.  

I understand you want the same result as you see in XBMC, but it would be built very differently.

45

XBMC doesn't separate the client and server.  There the display of collections is completely managed in the skin.  Because of the number of low-power clients for Plex, the same approach is not possible.  You can't have a Roku or AppleTV making complex decisions about how to display items without a very severe performance penalty.  

I understand you want the same result as you see in XBMC, but it would be built very differently.

Well for one it could be done easily via HTML no different than what PlexWeb displays.

And Second No one cares about Roku and Other Target devices being changed, we are talking about the Media Manager and PlexWeb.

Those other devices for the most part use DLNA to get their Library listing which doesn't parse any of the XML just the files if they adhere to strict DLNA standards.

And if they use a Plex App interface then it's no trouble at all to display the html generated by PlexWeb to get the desired affect.

So it's really not as hard as you think.

46

Well for one it could be done easily via HTML no different than what PlexWeb displays.

And Second No one cares about Roku and Other Target devices being changed, we are talking about the Media Manager and PlexWeb.

Those other devices for the most part use DLNA to get their Library listing which doesn't parse any of the XML just the files if they adhere to strict DLNA standards.

And if they use a Plex App interface then it's no trouble at all to display the html generated by PlexWeb to get the desired affect.

So it's really not as hard as you think.

Roku is one of the most heavily used clients and has nothing to do with PlexWeb.  It has its own SDK and is not an HTML wrapper at all.  It does not use DLNA.

47

I was considering this YESTERDAY (but have of course thought about it before), now I won't do a custom implementation since it really should be an official one.

Like the new "Butler" in the config section (which apparently is not in the new UI - since that one is called Scheduled Tasks there, but in the old one.)

Under the Butler section there could be LOADS of automated tasks, where for instance preferences like this could be managed.

48

I was considering this YESTERDAY (but have of course thought about it before), now I won't do a custom implementation since it really should be an official one.

Like the new "Butler" in the config section (which apparently is not in the new UI - since that one is called Scheduled Tasks there, but in the old one.)

Under the Butler section there could be LOADS of automated tasks, where for instance preferences like this could be managed.

Hi ... what are these "Butler" and "Scheduled Tasks" you're referring to? Thx.

49

Hi ... what are these "Butler" and "Scheduled Tasks" you're referring to? Thx.

Check the latest release (page2 currently) for Plex Media Server, in the Announcements section. He describes and shows pic of the Sched-tasks. The butler is something you find checking the settings of the PMS locally (after upgrading to that version) Butler contains nothing currently.

The sched-tasks you find if you browse to your server using the MyPlex new UI.

50

Check the latest release (page2 currently) for Plex Media Server, in the Announcements section. He describes and shows pic of the Sched-tasks. The butler is something you find checking the settings of the PMS locally (after upgrading to that version) Butler contains nothing currently.

The sched-tasks you find if you browse to your server using the MyPlex new UI.

Ahh nice ... thanks for the heads-up ... as you say, could be a mechanism to add some functionality to support collections.

51

Roku is one of the most heavily used clients and has nothing to do with PlexWeb.

Which says to me it should so when displaying Plex content it looks the same as Plex content everywhere else!

Point is the Display rendering can be done via Simple HTML which Roku is capable of rendering easily.

And that HTML is already present on the server.

52

You can use Sort Title to resolve that.  Each of the Indiana Jones movies has a sort title of "Indiana Jones YEAR" so that they show up in the right place and in the right order.  This is especially helpful with movie series that have reboots (Star Trek, Batman).

The idea of stacking the movies as you suggest is fairly specific to one client:  PHT.  Other clients are not as likely to interpret that multi-level stacking as well.  I'm aware of it being used in XBMC and was never a fan of it there either.

Sort doesn't even get close to being the same. Collection view would be a nice addition that could group related movies even if they're not called the same or if alphabetically their order is not the correct one. 

Your own examples show how this doesn't solve the request. "The Dark Knight Rises" has no "Batman" in it. The Rebooted Star Trek will be another, if the third is called "Star Trek 3" or "Star Trek: Something" or "Star Trek followed by a word starting alphabetically before 'Into'". Good luck trying to get the James Bond movies sorted alphabetically too. The last one is "Casino Royale", only "A view to kill" would be listed before it, but they're the 21st and 14th movies in the collection, respectively.

A collection could also group related movies that are not series, like the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy, the Marvel Phase one movies and could also cover movies and their spinoffs.

Currently MovieDBs support for collections is half a useful as I'd want it to be, but their list support complements it so well adding both would cover all my needs.

A sample list: http://www.themoviedb.org/list/50941077760ee35e1500000c

A sample collection: http://www.themoviedb.org/collection/645-james-bond-collection

Being able to get access to these lists would be fantastic. And the work is already there.

There's another point you make, which has made me think of something I hadn't put my finger on (not saying it is what you were saying, tho'):

Mentioning "XBMC already has it" to me has a very negative effect. Every time I see it it's made to sound as if it was something people would leave Plex for, which is ridiculous. XBMC having it also doesn't help the Plex team, since the XBMC code couldn't be used anyway.

This means there's nothing in mentioning it that makes it worth bringing it up, I so wish people stopped doing it.

53

XBMC doesn't separate the client and server.  There the display of collections is completely managed in the skin.  Because of the number of low-power clients for Plex, the same approach is not possible.  You can't have a Roku or AppleTV making complex decisions about how to display items without a very severe performance penalty.  

I understand you want the same result as you see in XBMC, but it would be built very differently.

Yes and no.

Storing the collection could be just another metadata field. Grouping by collection could then be done by the clients that wish to implement it, and not by the ones that can't support it (for example, clients that can't mix folders and movie items, or clients that can't have more than one level of depth in hierarchies).

Of course, having a single movie with a collection flag would still show that movie as a single item. Having more than one would show a collection by the client. The server doesn't need to do anything here.

A different thing would be to be able to see just collections (TMDB's or manual), which would only show collections with more than one item in them.

Adding this single bit of metadata officially would leave to clients to implement the logic, at their leisure, and add the preference each as they see fit.

54

Your own examples show how this doesn't solve the request. "The Dark Knight Rises" has no "Batman" in it. The Rebooted Star Trek will be another, if the third is called "Star Trek 3" or "Star Trek: Something" or "Star Trek followed by a word starting alphabetically before 'Into'". Good luck trying to get the James Bond movies sorted alphabetically too. The last one is "Casino Royale", only "A view to kill" would be listed before it, but they're the 21st and 14th movies in the collection, respectively.

A collection could also group related movies that are not series, like the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy, the Marvel Phase one movies and could also cover movies and their spinoffs.

Currently MovieDBs support for collections is half a useful as I'd want it to be, but their list support complements it so well adding both would cover all my needs.

A sample list: http://www.themoviedb.org/list/50941077760ee35e1500000c

A sample collection: http://www.themoviedb.org/collection/645-james-bond-collection

Being able to get access to these lists would be fantastic. And the work is already there.

I would say that adding/using the already implemented metadata-models for titles, could circumvent or eliminate the issues for collections.

Every movie released for (your example) the Marvel universe, would have "Marvel" in the metadata regardless of being Spiderman or something else, the same thing goes for "Dark knight" which would naturally contain a tag with "Batman".

It's a sweet feature to get most of this automated, however I would like to be able to control it very granular and to create my own with useful features like selection/invert select (which we currently don't even have anywhere in the GUI).

And just to have it mentioned, when the lists finally gets implemented, perhaps could we also use them as playlists? Finally? ...maybe? :D

(oh and by the way, I din't mention the XBMC-thingy because I personally don't care, but I do not agree with your stand. Of course Plex must keep a tight eye on competition and make sure plex-users gets everything and more. People saying "they have this and that over there" is a very good pointer on what should get support. Perhaps a tone of voice could be changed, agreed. But it's not that big of a deal really.)

55

Sort doesn't even get close to being the same. Collection view would be a nice addition that could group related movies even if they're not called the same or if alphabetically their order is not the correct one. 

Your own examples show how this doesn't solve the request. "The Dark Knight Rises" has no "Batman" in it. The Rebooted Star Trek will be another, if the third is called "Star Trek 3" or "Star Trek: Something" or "Star Trek followed by a word starting alphabetically before 'Into'". Good luck trying to get the James Bond movies sorted alphabetically too. The last one is "Casino Royale", only "A view to kill" would be listed before it, but they're the 21st and 14th movies in the collection, respectively.

Sort Title actually does exactly this.  You can leave any title you want but have it sorted by Series Year.  For example, The Dark Knight Rises could have a sort title of Batman 2012 or Dark Knight 2012 depending on whether you wanted it to appear in the list of movies as being part of all Batman movies or specifically part of the Dark Knight series.

Before dismissing an idea, you might want to check on something as obviously there as Sort Title.  By the way, all of the James Bond movies in my collection have a sort title of James Bond YEAR so that they are sorted in chronological order.

I would prefer that sort title and collection data be searched, but that is a completely separate request.

56

I would say that adding/using the already implemented metadata-models for titles, could circumvent or eliminate the issues for collections.

Every movie released for (your example) the Marvel universe, would have "Marvel" in the metadata regardless of being Spiderman or something else, the same thing goes for "Dark knight" which would naturally contain a tag with "Batman".

It's a sweet feature to get most of this automated, however I would like to be able to control it very granular and to create my own with useful features like selection/invert select (which we currently don't even have anywhere in the GUI).

And just to have it mentioned, when the lists finally gets implemented, perhaps could we also use them as playlists? Finally? ...maybe? :D

(oh and by the way, I din't mention the XBMC-thingy because I personally don't care, but I do not agree with your stand. Of course Plex must keep a tight eye on competition and make sure plex-users gets everything and more. People saying "they have this and that over there" is a very good pointer on what should get support. Perhaps a tone of voice could be changed, agreed. But it's not that big of a deal really.)

Unfortunately the request here is extremely confusing.  Plex already supports the automated population of movie series information by data in TMDB.  The request here is not about that, but about the display (on clients) of all movies in a collection being hidden behind a single icon in all clients.  Instead of seeing x number of movies in the All Movies list on these clients, you would only see the Collection name and then have to click the collection to see the individual movies.

The rest of the functionality mentioned in the thread is pretty much there between using sort titles and collections.

57

Of course, having a single movie with a collection flag would still show that movie as a single item. Having more than one would show a collection by the client. The server doesn't need to do anything here.

You are referring to clients that implement skins akin to the XBMC implementation.  Some of the clients are using SDKs that do not try to reparse the server's list of movies independently.  The client in XBMC groups those because of the method by which skins are implemented.  In clients such as Roku, the client is primarily populating lists of items based on data pulled directly from the server.  The client is VERY thin and would do a very poor job of attempting to recategorize and display items in the manner described.

58

The rest of the functionality mentioned in the thread is pretty much there between using sort titles and collections.

Not true. While I'm not replying directly to your condescending reply about sort titles, I might not have been clear about my point of being able to have multiple collections/groups for the same movie, and about not affecting the movie's natural order (since not everyone would want to look at it as part of the collection and using sort titles in this way would go against the original intended use of sort titles which, if I remember correctly, was about putting "logical" titles when the "official" title was not how the movie was known.

Suggesting to have "A View to Kill" in the "J", along with all James Bond movies, none of which start with a "J", would look downright schizophrenic.

To paraphrase: Before dismissing an idea, you might want to check if you're getting the intention behind it, instead of trying to shoehorn it into a different way you do things.

You are referring to clients that implement skins akin to the XBMC implementation.  Some of the clients are using SDKs that do not try to reparse the server's list of movies independently.  The client in XBMC groups those because of the method by which skins are implemented.  In clients such as Roku, the client is primarily populating lists of items based on data pulled directly from the server.  The client is VERY thin and would do a very poor job of attempting to recategorize and display items in the manner described.

You are clearly not even reading the posts you're commenting to, replying instead with preconceptions based on keywords. You also seem to think you understand how clients work/can work, but it sounds to be based on assumptions.

Essentially, you're wrong. Clients not only are not "thin" but they're not required to be. At different points we've had clients with different functionalities. Also we've had new functionality for clients built in some versions first and then extended.

You keep bringing up XBMC. I don't understand this obsession with XBMC. I used to develop for XBMC before "OSXBMC" and I have done the same for Plex since then (for my own use, obviously).

I've specifically mentioned how clients with less flexibility would work (like Roku, precisely) so you bringing it up can't mean anything other than either I didn't explain myself or that you didn't read what you were replying to (the alternative is that you did, and are being willfully obtuse, which I wouldn't understand the point of).

59

Unfortunately the request here is extremely confusing.  Plex already supports the automated population of movie series information by data in TMDB.  The request here is not about that, but about the display (on clients) of all movies in a collection being hidden behind a single icon in all clients.  Instead of seeing x number of movies in the All Movies list on these clients, you would only see the Collection name and then have to click the collection to see the individual movies.

The rest of the functionality mentioned in the thread is pretty much there between using sort titles and collections.

I have not seen the capability to do this, but perhaps I was adding on a function that is already there with my intention to:

1. Create "Collection"

2. User would be given the option to create based on metadata (I assume all current metadata provided by:) in TMDB. OR to select from his/her own metadata that has been added using "tags".

3. Clicking on for instance Marvel tag, would instantly create a collection of ALL the users Marvel-movies/shorts.

4. To make it a lot more granular the users is not limited to filter only once, but could also sort by year, and/or other criteria. Maybe only Unwatched after that, or select Hugh Jackman's appearances. Just to add to the freedom.

5. Make a playable list.

To clarify, with tags and list-creation; this would be a pretty powerful music-video playlist-creator too.

(Ps. at least for me I enjoy discussions and opinions but I sense its auto-negative on every single reply. Which kind of defeats the purpose....)

60

I have not seen the capability to do this, but perhaps I was adding on a function that is already there with my intention to:

1. Create "Collection"

2. User would be given the option to create based on metadata (I assume all current metadata provided by:) in TMDB. OR to select from his/her own metadata that has been added using "tags".

3. Clicking on for instance Marvel tag, would instantly create a collection of ALL the users Marvel-movies/shorts.

4. To make it a lot more granular the users is not limited to filter only once, but could also sort by year, and/or other criteria. Maybe only Unwatched after that, or select Hugh Jackman's appearances. Just to add to the freedom.

5. Make a playable list.

To clarify, with tags and list-creation; this would be a pretty powerful music-video playlist-creator too.

(Ps. at least for me I enjoy discussions and opinions but I sense its auto-negative on every single reply. Which kind of defeats the purpose....)

  1. You can create the collections in the edit movie (or edit item for other items) screen by simply adding a new or existing collection name.
  2. The option for using TMDB data to prefill collections is found under the agent options for TMDB.  It is not easy to find, but it is there.
  3. At this time, you have to go into each movie and add them to the collections you want if you are not letting TMDB prefill all collections.  I understand the preferred method you mention here, but that is not the manner in which it is done currently.  To accomplish that, collections would have to be a separate workflow instead of following the individual items.  This would require querying TMDB for all matching movies in a series and I am not sure that there is a mechanism for making such matches at this point.  It would require, in essence, for us to reconcile all movies to their TMDB entries, effectively rescanning them.  I would suggest an alternative to this method.  If we had a collections manager, we could simply let TMDB prefill all series (adding any we wanted that were not present) and remove any series from TMDB we did not want.  This would be much less onerous than the current process of having to remove collection information from each film individually.
  4. I do not disagree with that, but it would be unattainable in some of the clients.  PHT could handle it, but I doubt it would be effective in Roku or AppleTV.  Both of these are basically populating a list directly from the server into UI elements as part of their SDK.  They are great at populating lists, but not so great at doing any significant manipulations to the lists.
  5. I would love to have this functionality, but I would love to have smart playlists in general (other threads).

I enjoy the discussion, I just don't want an intermingled collections/single film view to become the default.  I'm all for it being an option, just not the default.  For this to be implemented effectively across most clients, it needs to be part of the API.  It could still have an impact on performance because the queries to flatten the view between single movies and collections will take more resources.  Doing this in the server makes much more sense than anywhere else, but it could have some performance impacts that would mean it should be an optional setting.

In very high level terms, the current query is something like:

SELECT movie_title, movie_id, ...

FROM movies

To be effective for the view preferred in this thread, it would have to be:

SELECT movie_title, movie_id, ...

FROM movies_not_in_a_collection_of_more_than_one_movie

UNION

SELECT collection_name, collection_id, ...

FROM collections_with_more_than_one_movie

Because both of the SELECTs in the bottom example are complex, we would be moving from one simple data pull to at least two, then combining them.  This could be slightly complicated by the number of films in multiple collections, but only marginally so.  We would just have to see how that performed on some very different server builds.

As far as XBMC being mentioned, it is done because Plex uses XBMC as a significant code base.  The view requested at the top of the thread is very much an XBMC skin-based view popularized a few years ago.

As an aside, I would love several related features that are probably better housed in other threads:

  • Search by collection name (so we don't have to put James Bond in the title), sort title, description, studio (check how many different Disney studio variations you have in your data)
  • Smart collections (playlists) by the same criteria available in search
  • Sharing collections (especially smart collections) in addition to sharing sections

My issue is not with additional functionality but with those espousing that the system is a failure in its current state because it does not support this view as the default.  Were the system as unwieldy as that assumes, far fewer people would have gone to the trouble of using it on a daily basis.  Plex works.  It has room for improvement, but it still represents a far better mix of features and accessibility (to a number of clients like the Roku and Chromecast) than any other option out there.