Server Version#: 1.30.2.6563-3d4dc0cce
Player Version#: 4.99.2 (?)
I love Plex but this is driving me crazy.
Why on earth can’t we mix media types in a library?
I have a library called “Standup”, and to get (for example) Daniel Sloss or Stewart Lee’s standup TV series’ to be recognised, seeing as they are “TV” not “movies”, I have had to create another library called “StandupTV”.
This is just crazy, and I can’t help thinking that there must be some kind of technical reason why mixing media types per library can’t be done – anyone know if that’s the case?
What makes it all the more frustrating is that if you pick “Video files” as the library type, you can then only “match” one type of media or the other, making it no more useful than using either Movie or TV library types. Unless I’m missing something?
Please please please can we have libraries with mixed media types!
Or at very least the facility to visually “merge” two or more libraries in the UI so that they’re displayed as one but sourced from multiple libraries behind the scenes.
As I understand it, the scanners/agents that retrieve metadata from the online databases for TV and Movies are quite different, possibly because the structure of metadata in general is different (no seasons/episodes for movies, for example).
The “Other Videos” library type is not intended for commercial movies. It’s more for things like your home videos, stuff that wouldn’t have the kind of metadata that commercial movies/shows have.
It may be technically possible to combine all that in a single scanner/agent, but it would be a big job.
What you can do is create collections. If you add the movies and shows you want together to a Collection with exactly the same name (not “begins with xyz” or “contains xyz”), you will be able to see all of them on a page. Here’s a screenshot of one of my collections. You can see the movies, soundtracks, and audiobooks on one page, even though they are all in different libraries. If there were a TV show with the same Collection name, that would show up here as well:
Thanks for your detailed reply beckfield, I appreciate it.
I’m a programmer, though not a brilliant one, and I know there’s certainly stuff going on in the server that’s way more complex than I can imagine, so I’m not trying to pretend knowledge I don’t have, but I can’t see why it would be so hard to code for a library type that can handle both “Films” and “TV shows” media types. The whole Plex experience is so polished and I don’t believe the developers wouldn’t be able to do it.
Ok so say you add stuff to one of these joint-media libraries. Plex would scan the files as if they’re a movie. If it doesn’t get a match, it scans them as if they’re TV. If it still doesn’t get a match, it treats them like the current “Other videos” media type.
Within any “Films” or “TV shows” media type library, there is already the potential to have multiple object types: In a “Films” library for example you can have the films themselves, as well as both manual and smart collections.
In a “TV shows” library you can have shows displayed as a single season if there’s only one, or as automatically-generated “Seasons”, which are very similar to Smart Collections.
There’s already a mix of media types in the grid in the Watchlist. The objects here don’t behave exactly like their equivalents in the libraries (you have to find something in a library if you want to edit it, for example) but they’re nonetheless a mixture of media types, in the same grid.
I know you know all that. The point is that the devs obviously know their ■■■■. I really hope they do decide to address this as it would be a very cool enhancement.
(Folders/directories are soooo last millennium anyway… the Plex libraries could more usefully be based on keywords/tags instead of folders, imho. Or as well. But that’s for another post.)
I’ve got several mixed media libraries, and I’ve handled them a couple of ways over time. Life gets complicated sometimes, and it can be for me with MusicTV, Documentaries, Railways & etc.
Originally I’d plop the media in a single folder and create two libraries — e.g, Railway (TV) and Railway (movies) and let Plex sort ‘em out. Trouble is, the off-piste stuff gets missed, or mismatched.
Rather than filter out the non-TV non-movie matched items, I went with Other for the type and now everything gets picked up. However, it does mean having to be regular with naming.
I might just go through things and try the collection route.
