Hey Plex team and community,
I want to revisit something that’s come up repeatedly on this forum since at least 2019 — the read-only state of ChapterDB at chapterdb.plex.tv — and make a concrete case for why reopening community submissions would be genuinely valuable in 2025.
Where things stand:
Plex has been hosting a read-only mirror of the original chapterdb.org database for years now, and we’re grateful for it. The data that’s there is still useful and actively accessed. But the database stopped accepting new entries years ago, and films released after that cutoff simply don’t exist in it — which is an increasingly large chunk of any modern library.
The timing couldn’t be better:
Blu-ray is experiencing a genuine resurgence in 2025, with sales up 15% and 4K UHD leading the charge. 4K UHD Blu-ray sales in the US rose 12% in 2025 compared to 2024 — the first year of growth since 2018. This isn’t a niche blip — steelbooks and collector editions saw sales jump 25% from 2023 to 2024, representing intentional, deliberate purchases from people who care deeply about the disc experience. These are exactly the Plex users who want named chapters.
This mirrors what happened with vinyl records — a format written off as dead that found a new, passionate audience willing to invest in the full experience. Physical media is finding its floor, and the people still buying discs are enthusiasts who care about every detail of playback quality — including chapters.
Meanwhile, streaming services have quietly validated the feature entirely. Netflix, Disney+, and others now display named chapter markers for their original content. What was once considered a disc-only luxury is now a baseline expectation for quality playback. Plex users building libraries from physical media deserve the same experience — and ChapterDB is the infrastructure that makes it possible.
What we’re actually asking for:
Not a rebuild from scratch. Not a new product. Just the ability for logged-in Plex users to submit chapter names and timestamps for titles that aren’t in the database yet. The infrastructure already exists. The community clearly wants to contribute — the same request has appeared in this forum in 2019, 2020, 2021, and again in 2025. That’s not noise, that’s a consistent signal.
Even a simple submission form with basic moderation (flag obviously wrong entries, allow community voting on accuracy) would be enough. The original chapterdb.org ran exactly this way and built a remarkably clean dataset through community effort alone. The chapter data format is an open standard — MKV chapter XML is straightforward to validate automatically, which keeps the moderation burden low.
Why it matters:
There’s a small but dedicated community already doing this work manually — building chapter XMLs from disc menus, online synopses, and scene breakdowns, then stamping them into local files. That effort should feed back into a shared resource rather than staying locked in individual libraries. Every Marvel film since 2019, every major 4K release of the last several years, every disc that came out after the freeze — none of them have named chapters in ChapterDB. That’s years of exactly the content the physical media resurgence is built around.
A modest ask:
Even just acknowledging whether community submissions are technically feasible, or whether there are legal or licensing reasons they can’t reopen it, would be genuinely helpful. If it’s a resource question, the community might be able to help with moderation. If it’s a legal question, knowing that lets us stop asking and look for other solutions.
ChapterDB was — and still is — a genuinely useful feature that makes Plex a better media player. The disc community is growing again. It’s worth keeping pace with them. I myself have 20 plus xmls i could add.
Thanks for reading.
