Can I show trailers from movies that AREN'T in my library?

[ryanplant-au]

I want to recreate part of the experience of renting videotapes in the olden days: popping a movie in and being greeted with a few trailers for things you might never have heard of before. I thought I’d download a hoard of movie trailers from YouTube, save them in a ‘Trailers’ folder, tell Plex about it, and have it pick a random 3 each time I started a movie.

Reading about the trailers feature in Plex, though, it seems like it’s intended to show trailers only from other movies in your library.

Then I had what I thought was a great idea. I’d create a second movies library, with a dummy 5 KB file representing a movie whose trailer I had, and store the trailers alongside those. Then I could browse my normal movie library, and it’d play trailers from the dummy library. Perfect. But alas that doesn’t seem to work, playing movies from the normal movies library won’t play trailers from other movie libraries.

So I thought I’d ask here – has anyone else found a solution to this sort of thing? What are my options, if I want to do this?

And a secondary question: if I do get something like this to work, is there a way I can ensure two users watching the same movie get the same set of trailers? My main use of Plex is for my partner and I to watch movies together while we’re apart, pressing play at the same time, so matching the trailers would matter.

My only idea right now that solves both problems is a sort of ridiculous one: encode all my trailers identically, then write a script that picks a few at random, concatenates them together with ffmpeg, and attaches it to one particular movie in my Plex library as its trailer. So from Plex’s POV there’d only ever be one possible trailer included in the library, played before every movie as the only possible selection. But its content would change every time I ran the script. The downside here, aside from the obvious pain in the ass, is that it’d make it impossible to actually have the proper trailers for anything.

[beckfield]

There are several options regarding trailers in your server Settings/Extras:

[The_Scraggler]

This is exactly what I would like to do also but it seems that in order to play trailers you’ve downloaded yourself, you need to have the movie also. Then you have to create a folder for the movie you already have (wherever your media is stored) and then add your downloaded trailer to that folder, with the correct naming structure of course. So you would have to create a folder for every individual movie in your library and place the movie and the trailer inside it. At least that’s how I understand it. If you’ve got 20 movies, that’s one thing. But 2000 movies? Forget it. If you just want random trailers from movies you don’t have, you’re at the mercy of whatever agent you’re using and then you end up getting absolutely terrible stuff. I can’t believe that you can’t just point Plex to a “Trailers” folder and have it play from that but there’s no option for it.