HI, I hope someone can help me better orgainise and view my media. Firstly I have two main plex servers at home and mainly watch plex media on my tv using a roku. On server 1 I have movies and tv shows as well as college/educational courses. On server 2 I have mainly computer tutorials and how to’s.
The TV and Movie selection is fine since Plex does the heavy lifting and gets the images and info and displays it so it’s easy to find stuff. The problem I have is with the other media. The courses and tutorials are almost always multi-file and organised in folders. I have created libraries for each (one for courses and one for tutorials) and have selected ‘other videos’ as the library type.
When I want to view a tutorial, it is hard to find the tutorial I want because I need to view the selection in Folder view (otherwise plex throws up all the video files and it’s impossible to find anything) but it only shows a preview of the folder name and many of them start with the same words (eg, Advanced photoshop…) and I can’t tell which folder is which. Also when playing it doesn’t automatically play the next file in the folder the way the TV library does. I’ve gotten around this by making a playlist but that is tedious to do because I can’t easily make a playlist from a folder: I need to choose the first file in the folder and create a playlist with it and then add all the other files individually to the playlist. Also many tutorials and course have subfolders but these are lost when making a playlist.
Is there any way to fix this issue with non standard (ie non-TV and non-Movie) media? How can I make a playlist from a folder? Are there any plugins that will help? Can I organise my library folders or rename them to make Plex work better?
I think you should be able to find a media tag editor and modify the title tags in the files so they display the pertinent information… You can modify individual tag entries inside plex, but doing large amounts of files, I would use a third party editor… I use easytag. There is still going to be some manual work to be done… but it you closer with some of the bigger tasks done.
Another trick for the folders… if you cannot actually rename the folders before adding them to plex to make them display in a shorter title, you can create a link to the folder with a shorter title… and add that link as a folder instead of the actual folder…
I use a lot of playlists. A trick to adding multiple files to a playlist is to go to the folder, view the contents in list mode, press shift, and click on the first item you want… then press shift and click on the last item, all items in between in the list will be selected… You can use ctl to individually select or deselect items instead of selecting a range…
Thanks Montys, That helps a bit but it’s still frustrating that an application that is meant to organise and play a media library does not have robust organisational tools.
It is slightly better to add multiple files to a playlist at a time (thanks for the tip) but it only reduces the tedium a bit. I still need to drill down through each of the subfolders to get to the file level before I can do this. For example one tutorial I have (and it’s one of the shorter ones) has seven subfolders and each subfolder has between 1-3 video files. This means that as opposed to adding 16 files individually to a playlist, I can add 7 groups, which is still an improvement but only marginally.
I would much rather have Plex and my computer do the work of identifying the video files within a folder and subfolders and creating a playlist.
Being able to click on the top folder and just say look for all the video files within this folder and subfolders and make a playlist from this with the title of the top folder, would be helpful. Or best of all would be a drag and drop into the playlist from the library. Wow, that would make my day.
