Collections missing when viewing movie info via Discover

General Discussions Plex Features
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When looking at movie information via Discover, more often than not there isn’t a “Collections” row showing other movies in the same collection. Yet if I have this in my own Library, and I press the button from Discover to access it, up pops an almost identical movie information and now containing the collections row. So this is fine if I already have the movie (albeit cumbersome) though surely the point of Discover is surely to discover new stuff?

When browsing at a newly ‘discovered’ movie I want to see if it’s in a collection - if so I often want to watch the proceeding movies before this one. If it’s called “Great Movie 4” then it’s rather obvious I’ve got three to first catch up on, but often movie titles are more subtle. Surely this is an obvious feature?

Am I missing something?

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It’s kind of a quirk of “Discover”. When you browse the “Discover” section, you are (essentially) at this point looking at the movie’s entry on IMDB, not your own. The poster image it picks may be different than your own server’s copy, especially if you customize your own posters.

Because it’s not YOUR copy it is displaying, it cannot show your own server’s collection info. They barely got this page to display that the movie is available from your server at all (via the “Play on your server” button).

I WOULD like it if they included more metadata on these pages though. Perhaps you mentioned this, but it’d be nice to see if the movie belongs to a collection, using the TMDB collection option seen on their site. Since they pull all kinds of metadata from there for this “Discover” feature, it’s already something they could reproduce. These other parts of the movie series wouldn’t link you straight to your own copy of the movie, but to these movies in their discover feature.

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Figured as much, thanks for confirming. Your suggestion is exactly what I’d expect and want to happen: if a movie is part of a collection, regardless as to whether I have it or not, I’d like to know. This also seems fitting if we are at this point viewing this information from a 3rd party provider (eg. IMDB) and not our own library.

At the risk of complicating what I’ve just requested above, I see two further enhancements:

  1. If the movie is already in our own library, selecting in Discover should go straight to this entry and not the 3rd party page. I’d suggest 9 times out of 10 if you already have the media in your library then you are going to play it from there, no? They could of course also include the Alternative Sources button as per they currently do if they so wished.

  2. Separately, back to the collections (and nothing to do with Discover): when I look at the information for a movie in my library I’d like to know if it is in a collection with other movies, regardless of whether I have them or not. Ideally would be presented in a way that can be easily distinguishable between movies in the collection I do have and those I don’t.

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  1. This would be nice, but I am afraid of what happens for people that have access to more than one server. I myself am guilty of this kind of thinking, in where I run my own server and that is the only server I see. I start to think of the UI choices as being a bit strange that they do not point directly - and immediately - to my source.

But I have to step back and think about some power users that have friends (a scary thought!). These friends may all have servers shared with eachother, with overlapping content. One friend might have DVDrips (480p), while another is a cinephile and only carries 4K BR Remuxes. At that point, I can’t imagine Plex wanting to take a stance on automatically choosing for you which item to pick as the “default” choice when viewing an item in Discover. But then, I can be quite indecisive and the thought of having to make an arbitrary choice like that - and forcing such a choice on others - kind of scares me. So I would have ended up taking the same path as Plex took, and simply presents all source choices automatically, even if there is only one choice.

That said, I am in favor of an option, where if you are in a single-source account like mine, that it should simply choose the local option automatically. Though based on how often people get the different show-level, season-level, episode-level menus confused, having Discover act differently based on what content you own makes me get frustrated again. At least in this case, you can recognize that Plex is consistent when it comes to the behavior of the Discovery feature. Even if it’s inconvenient, at least its consistent.

  1. That’s an interesting thought. Sometimes I will browse my owned movies in TMDB to see if there is a sequel to it that I didn’t know about. Being able to see this in-Plex would be darned convenient. I like the idea. While we’re on this subject, I think the work to implement this idea would require a bit of an overhaul of an item’s page.

For the moment, let me sidetrack for a second. Your movie library home pages can be customized fairly well with a few standard widgets (and some custom ones, based on smart collections): Recently Added, Recently Watched, Top rated in [GENRE], etc. Similarly to this, Movie item pages also have widgets: Related Movies, Other Movies by [DIRECTOR], More With [ACTOR], etc. However, it almost seems random which of these widgets are included in a movie.
(On testing, it seems a “More With [ACTOR]” and "More by [DIRECTOR] widgets appear if there are 5 or more other items in your library with them in it)

What I think I’d like, is the ability to FORCE items in a Movie Library to always include one or more of these widgets, regardless of item count. While we are picking these widgets to include in a movie’s page, we could ask for other widgets, such as “Movies in this collection I don’t own” or something similar. At the very least, you could choose between “Movies in this collection I own” or “All Movies in this collection”, with the latter one allowing you to be taken to the Discover entry for the movie if it doesn’t exist in a library.

You have now made me want these features I didn’t know I needed. :laughing:

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