Since moving my server to Linux from Windows last November, I have been unable to get my music extras (mostly music videos, but I also have interviews and live performances) to show up or be recognized by Plex. At the time I thought it was something to do with the way I entered the extras folder (spaces and all) but I’ve tried all permissible versions of the folder and still can’t get them to show.
I’ve had to move the ones I always watch to the artist folder. This works but the reason I can’t move everything from my global extras folder to artist folders is that I have a backup process that backups my music and I’d like to keep the backup footprint as small as possible which cannot happen if videos are included as well.
A related problem is that I’ve never been able to get the inline music extras to work (even on Windows). Some time ago I discovered for TV shows, the season level extras only show up on the mobile apps (and wish they’d show up on the TV, console, and web versions at least since most of my users are on that). Following this discovery, I figured inline music extras may just show up in the mobile apps I opened up Plex on my phone and went to an album with an included video file but that didn’t show. What made this hurt more is when looking up a solution before posting this question, I saw this post which shows a screenshot of the inline process working for someone else with the very artist I have been looking at in my tests for Global and inline videos. I checked the Xbox player, mobile app, desktop app, localhost, and https://app.plex.tv app to see if the inline videos would show up to no avail.
Please assist.
EDIT: I figured I could just squeeze in a question related to the issue although it’s not about music extras. What prompted me to post is that I was looking in the discover section on my Xbox and encountered a show called Die Hart 2: Die Harter. When I opened the show in the discover section it didn’t show a trailer but showed a different trailer when I went into each season. This made me think season level extras are now supported so I went to Star Trek Discovery and refreshed metadata then opened it up in all players to see if my season level extras (trailers and more would show) and they only showed up for the mobile app. Is this a limitation of the PMS that we host versus what Plex has on app.plex.tv? or is this a feature that will come later on for everyone?
I’ve just double-checked the music videos I’ve added to my music library using the global music video folder. It seems they’re all showing up alright.
Have you verified the permissions for that folder are ok for Plex to see the folder and its contents?
As for local extras for tv-shows – there’s an overview which clients are capable to display extras for what tiers of a show (show, season, episode) in the related support article. In addition there’s a feature suggestion asking for all clients to support all tiers of local extras for tv shows.
So… I read your response a little more than an hour ago and got lost in rabbit holes and forgot to give feedback…
Season & Episode Extras - When I saw the supported clients list I went about changing a few things including how I named the extras and now I see season and episode extras on my Xbox. Not on the desktop or browser but I can live with that. A number of my users are desktop or browser based so for now they won’t know these extras exist and hopefully it will light up for them in the future. It took a while to figure out how to get my extras to show with custom names instead of “Scene1” “Scene2” and the like. Episode Base Name - Custom name-scene.ext is how I got it to work show me the custom names.
After some tinkering I figured that for inline videos to work I had to not only match the name of the song but the track number as well. This had the added (and in my case unwanted) side effect of showing the video under the artist with the name “02 - Caribbean Blue” under Enya extras but I now get the overlay and the option to play the video on both the Xbox and Desktop view. I haven’t tried on other players. Getting rid of the song number was a matter of following the same naming convention for custom episode extra names above… a hyphen and descriptive name. There is, however, no indication on the Xbox that a video exists for the song in question though.
The solution for global music extras is one I could not adopt. TL; DR it had to do with spaces in the path name. I have 2 external drives (4TB & 2TB) from which my library is hosted. I created these on Windows with descriptive names as the labels. XFadz Videos (before setting up a plex server of my own I’d rip videos here and play directly on my XBox) and “Plex Drive2” bought and named after I set up Plex. Moving a couple of videos to test with to “/home/fadz/Videos/Plex/Music” worked. The trouble is I have quite a ton of vidoes (interviews, live performances, concerts, music videos etc) and putting them in my os drive will not be practical. I don’t want all that streaming on my OS’s NVMe and I doubt I have the space for all of them. Is there a way to get around this space in the path issue?
Details Regarding global music extras, I had doubts that it had to do with permissions. My global music extras folder was in the same location TV shows and movies come from that drive.
/Videos
/TV
/Allo Allo
/...
/Movies
/Arrival (2016)
/...
/Music
DMX - Slippin-video.mkv
/Enya
On My Way Home.webm
/Kris Kross
Jump.mp4
None of these are providing any joy. In case there really was an issue with the folder regarding permissions, I created (not moved) a similar folder in a drive that Plex has never had problems with (it has read only permissions on the original drive - another issue I haven’t managed to resolve) and copied over a few videos just to test. I tried naming the global music folder in the settings with a trailing slash “/”, without one, a leading slash, without one, quoted name, escaped name and various combinations of these and still for some reason can’t see the extras that are in there.
Perhaps I’m making some rookie mistake somewhere. I even checked if there was an option in the music library to include global extras but didn’t find one.
What my global music videos path looks like after tinkering
Above is what my global music video path looks like. I even tried using the escaped /media/fadz/XFadz\ Videos/… with and without the quotes but that hasn’t worked for me. Getting around that space is proving to be troublesome.
So I now have my favorite music videos inline with the music but decided not to move what was in the global music video folder.
I got the idea to create a symlink to the folder and see if that works but I don’t know if Plex and symlinks play nicely together. Has anyone tried this before?
What’s with the quotation marks? Are you sure these are needed?
The global music video folder looks like this on my system: (sorry, only Windows)
You need to use subfolders per artist which should exactly match the artist name.
Global music videos are only appearing on the Artist page, not on the album pages.
All the inline videos are appearing on the album page as tiny icons (like above), but also on the Artist page under Extras.
This works only with “Plex Music” as both agent and scanner.
Any changes with music videos require “Refresh Metadata” at the artist level to get picked up.
I tried both with and without the quotation marks. This folder worked when my server was on Windows but since moving it to Linux it has not been picked up. I initially thought the feature perhaps had issues in Linux but after some experiments, I found that if I put it in /home/username/Music/Videos these videos were picked up. So my new operating theory was the space in the volume name. It turns out that my issue was one of patience… Asking it to refresh metadata was taking longer than I expected so I didn’t see it work and then made another change. I refreshed the metadata for the entire music library about an hour ago and just checked right now and saw that the videos in the folder are now available for selection.
I managed to get the inline videos (and extras for TV episodes and seasons) working on the day I asked the question.
I understand you to be saying that although ‘In-line’ music videos can not only be associated with the artist, but also individual tracks and stored within the album folder (appropriate naming required of course), when using the ‘Global Music Videos’ folder, videos can ONLY be associated with the artist and NOT individual tracks.
This is not my understanding from the Docs, which seem to imply that using a GMV folder provides the same functionality as ‘in-line’, but simply allows the videos to be stored separately. I have also read others’ examples with specific mention that videos are associated with tracks (if correctly named).
Would appreciate it if you could clarify the above. Do the 2 methods provide the same result as implied by the Docs and other personal examples, or does each method have different capabilities as you state?
Thanks for clarifying, but who is responsible for documentation such as:-
Note : When using a “global” folder for your videos, if you wish to have music videos associated with particular tracks in your library (so that they appear on—and can be accessed with—the track), be sure to name the video file with the same track name as the track file.
This is clearly and absolutely incorrect and misleading. Leading to much confusion and many questions on the forum. That page needs to be edited as a matter of urgency. Documentation that is so fundamentally incorrect is worse than no documentation at all.
Not sure if there’s been any misunderstanding above about this, but I’ve been reliably informed (by a Plex employee) that the docs I mentioned are correct and in fact videos in a Global Music Videos folder CAN be linked to individual tracks. There’s just a slightly different naming scheme required, so pretty much what the docs stated, albeit rather ambiguously.
I am in the process of confirming the exact required procedure and will report back here once I’ve done that and established that it does work.
So light at the end of the tunnel perhaps. Hope it doesn’t collapse before I reach it.
I can confirm (having got it working and seen it with my own eyes) that videos in a Global Music Videos folder CAN be associated with individual music tracks. They have to be named exactly the same as for ‘in-line’ videos and in the GMV/Artists folder (or I believe just in the GMV folder). If in any GMV/Artist/Album folder, they will NOT be seen.
There is currently an issue with them appearing twice with slightly different names, but that’s a bug that is being fixed.
So the Global Music Videos folder can provide the same level of functionality as placing videos in-line which is good news.
Not perfect though as it means having track videos cluttering up the Artist folder (or worse the GMV folder) and that could cause naming issues to avoid duplicate file names.
Hopefully we might see some improvement in this sometime. Hint, hint, Plex devs.
Could you give a screenshot of one such file, and its naming. I’m assuming the folder structure under that artist in the GMV doesn’t have to include the album name.
The matching is done solely by track filename. So to match a track, the video filename HAS to start with the track filename root (i.e. no extension), then it can have ’ - someothername’ which will be its displayed name and then it can have -video, but even if not it will be assumed the -video type. NO OTHER TYPE is acceptable and will cause the video to be ignored.
In order to be matched the video file CANNOT be in any Album subfolder as if it is, it will be ignored. I always store Music with Artist/Album folders, but even so, a video in the GMV folder has to be in the GMV/Artist folder, i.e. no Album, although if the track filename contains the album, then so must the video.
I am told a video with the correct naming can also be matched if it’s in the GMV folder itself, but I’ve not confirmed that as it’s bad enough that videos cannot be in an album folder and all clutter up the Artist folder. Having all track videos cluttering up the GMV folder top level would be even worse.
From this you can imagine that there could be duplicate filename conflicts and you’d be right. Just one of the repercussions of the rather poorly thought out GMV concept.
Some discussion of it all and my suggestion as to what would be a better Music Video system for all can be found here.
I would argue the docs still need to be updated / clarified because the requirement to not include the album folder is not expressly stated in the docs currently.
