Maybe this has been discussed before, but I wasn’t able to find a thread. Why isn’t is possible to store the bif video thumbnails with your movies as another piece of metadata? I just moved my plex folder from an eight year old laptop hard drive to an SSD. There were well over 300,000 pieces of metadata in my plex folder. It would have taken eternity to move them all over to the new SSD so I opted to let it rebuild the bif’s, which is also going to take weeks. It seems there is a very simple solution to this problem. Why is that option not available to us?
@garmon said:
Why isn’t is possible to store the bif video thumbnails with your movies as another piece of metadata?
Because Plex is designed to keep the bif files in separate folders. Are there reasons? Probably, and probably quite good ones. One reason I can see is so that the bif, and other support files, are kept independent of the actual videos. That would allow the relocating of the videos without having to relocate all the support files.
Another good reason is that Plex does not want to in any way touch the original videos except to read them. I kind of like it this way because should I ever choose to remove Plex (as unlikely as that is) I can remove all the support files Plex uses with one action and be sure that action will not remove my original videos or alter them at all.
When I first started using Plex I too wanted to store the bif files along side my videos but I have come to the conclusion that the way Plex does it is actually better.
The one thing I don’t like about the method Plex uses is that I would like the support files to have names that have meaning for humans. Right now it is quite hard to find what files are associated with a given movie. I don’t really care “where” they are but it would be good to at least know what they are.
Should of just copied the bif files. Would of been a few hours max, way less time then having your cpu work for the next few weeks doing them.
