This feature suggestion is about automatic previews; a short clip, anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, that plays in place of the background image when browsing the Home or Recommended page or when currently viewing the media page.
It would be up to the server administrator, if they so choose, to select which part of the movie to play, specifying for example that the background preview for movie X should play the part from 19:01 to 20:31. Therefore the preview would not be a file of its own, but rather Plex would play the movie itself- but just the specified part.
It might not be as big an implementation as some other feature suggestions are, as:
Plex already has the ability to play movies of course and to skip to a specific point in the timeline
Automatic videos playing in the background when browsing already exist in the “Trending Trailers” section.
Yes, this is the Netflix approach. I believe it would lead to more activity from users.
This is no doubt a feature for those with a more “curated” server as you would need to point any movie (or TV series) you want a preview of to the right point in the timeline.
Manually selecting individual ranges / clips of a video will probably be more of a niche use case (imagine you have to do this for all your content to give your users a consistent experience).
As you pointed out, Plex will already autoplay trailers in place of the background art in certain clients / configurations. There’s an existing feature suggestion discussing for Plex to apply that to all content types (not just as part of Discover). Just mentioning this as a reference.
I agree it would be more niche but also really cool!
I had seen that other feature suggestion, but decided to create my own as I personally am not really interested in trailers playing for these reasons:
They’re loud.
For any movie that’s not recent, the video quality looks pretty bad.
They’re often made in that era’s style of trailers and rarely make you want to watch the movie, in my experience.
Like, I know I have the Lawrence of Arabia 4K restoration and it looks freaking great, but the low-res faded trailer from that era isn’t gonna show that to my users when they’re browsing.
