A bit confused about these. Having read about them in the support articles, sounded simple enough, but then when searching these forums I read several apparently recent posts saying they’re not yet available. So are they available as indicated in the docs, or not, as claimed in the forums?
But my question regarding their use (if they are available) is what media can be so grouped? Obviously Movies, but does that include ANY Library of type Movies? What about the other library types? Undoubtedly not for Music, but what about libraries of type Home Videos or TV Shows?
What’s described in the support docs is what is currently available. You can add Collection tags to all your James Bond movies, for example, and that will show up in the Filters/Collections list.
What people are asking for in the Forums is to see a single poster in their library for James Bond, and clicking that poster brings up the list of James Bond movies.
As for where you can currently add Collection tags:
Movies, as you noticed.
Home Videos
Music (although, you can only add a Collection tag to Artists, but not Albums or Tracks. Kinda doesn’t make sense, at least to me).
I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure you can’t mix media types in the same collection.
Someone else may be able to give more detailed info, but that’s what I know about it. Hope it helps.
Thanks. So I misunderstood Collections. I thought they did provide a single entry which you then clicked on to get the list of items in the Collection. Then I add my name to the list of requestors for that feature.
It’s an annoying fact that media is so hard to categorise. Some films are more like TV Shows with episodes and vice versa. Software really should cater for that variety instead of making the user have to munge their media into the pre-defined ‘libraries’. I know, dream on.
Right now I’m trying to come to terms with how to store Videos about music. Documentaries and stuff like that. Most;ly not Music Videos in the traditional sense (although some are), but not Movies and as one-offs, not really TV Shows either. But some of them are episodes from a music documentary series on TV. It’s hard to categorise them all.
What do others do with different types of music related videos?
If they pertain to a particular artist who is in your music library, you might add the videos according to this page. They’ll show up on the Artist page.
I don’t use Movie and TV libraries much, but I would think the TV documentary would go in a TV library. They could also go in a Home Video library. There will be no online metadata in that case.
How does one access Music Videos in Plex? It’s not an actual Library that can be selected. Is it same as iTunes and all done inside the Music Library? Is there some way to access just the Music Videos?
Until I’ve got the Libraries set up it’s hard to tell and I don’t want to try that until I know a bit more about how Plex behaves and so how best to prepare my media before importing into Plex.
By the way, in addition to the above, I have also created a separate Movies-type library for music videos.
Music videos that are associated with albums are located in the album folders along with the music tracks (has to be that way for the Inline method to work). But I have some videos that aren’t associated with artists, so they are in a separate folder. When I created a Movie library and set it to search both the separate folder and the Music folders, I get a library that just has music videos.
@UKenGB said:
Until I’ve got the Libraries set up it’s hard to tell and I don’t want to try that until I know a bit more about how Plex behaves and so how best to prepare my media before importing into Plex.
Plex has a good guide for media preparation.
@UKenGB said:
Until I’ve got the Libraries set up it’s hard to tell and I don’t want to try that until I know a bit more about how Plex behaves and so how best to prepare my media before importing into Plex.
Plex has a good guide for media preparation.
I’m off for the holidays, and probably won’t be online for a few days, so unless someone else picks up the thread, any further answers will be a few days off.
@beckfield, thank you so much, you have been enormously helpful, but is your name actually also Ken, or did you set up those folders just as a demonstration for me.
Your examples also helped answer another question, when a Library scans a folder, it only picks up the relevant media, so a movie library will only find movies which is good to know.
I see a lot of potential for being able to add multiple libraries, each for a specific purpose and the folders can be located anywhere. It’s what iTunes is so lacking at the moment. I set up a scheme that automounted different folders from different servers and they also shared between them and it would have worked well, until I discovered that iTunes simply cannot deal with network shares as it’s individual media folders. It reads everything fine, but cannot or will not write and complains it cannot find the folder, presumably because it has the share mounted on it. But of course it ought to respect that and simply use the path as is and ignore the fact that it is a network mount. But Apple have a problem with unix standard methodology and seems to mostly ignore it. E.g. it treats symlinks like aliases, but they are NOT the same thing at all and should behave differently. Yet the Finder etc ignores that and deals with them as if they are aliases. Due to iTunes not playing nice with network shares, I’m looking at Plex.
However, I still need to use iTunes, at least until I know that Plex can do everything I want (I’m hopeful). So for the moment I need to leave the folder structure as is. Music Videos will remain on-line and only one of each Library type and all folders local. Assuming all goes well, I’ll then start to introduce Plex only features that will be inaccessible to iTunes. But first I want to get the basics right.
One more question about usage. Where do you place videos that you might purchase on a DVD but which are not films, e.g. stand-up comics’ live shows? They are not TV Shows and not Movies in the real sense, although information is probably available about them on the 'Net, so they’re not Home videos either. But if you create a Library just for them, would you use a Movies or a TV Shows Library?
The former initially makes sense, but in fact any of those might become part of a series, in which case a TV Shows library would be more suitable. I was wondering what others do with this sort of media?
I don’t use Plex extensively for videos, TV, or movies, so I’m not much help there. Probably the first thing I would do is find out if the show is listed in The Movie Database or TVDB, which would tell you which way to go. Beyond that, I don’t have much advice. Heck, I’d probably add it to a Movie library and see if it matches. If it does, you’re done. If it doesn’t, try it in a TV library.
@beckfield said:
By the way, in addition to the above, I have also created a separate Movies-type library for music videos.
Music videos that are associated with albums are located in the album folders along with the music tracks (has to be that way for the Inline method to work). But I have some videos that aren’t associated with artists, so they are in a separate folder. When I created a Movie library and set it to search both the separate folder and the Music folders, I get a library that just has music videos.
…
So you can have it both (or all three) ways.
Finally at the point where I need to think again about the Music Videos subject. Some is easy, like the videos that are associated specifically with an artist for which I have music, can be stored in-line. Then as per backfield’s suggestion, a separate folder (e.g. MusicVideos) for videos not associated with particular artists and create a Movies type Library pointing at both the Music and this MusicVideos folders. But am I right in thinking I can also specify this MusicVideos folder as the actual Global Music Videos Folder? Is this what you meant by having it 3 ways?
It then leaves some series type music video media but which are basically from a TV Show rather than associated with any album. I really want these grouped like a TV Show, but is the only way to do this to put them in a separate folder and create a TV Shows type Library to point at it? It would work, but no longer would I have all the music related videos under the single Library as discussed above.
I could leave them in-line (under VARIOUS ARTISTS) and should see them grouped by album when browsing the Music Library. But in the separate MusicVideos Library discussed above, they’d all just be listed separately would they not? Isn’t there ANY way to group videos, like I thought Collections did, so just one entry when browsing the library but can be opened to see all the individual videos, like tracks of an album. I think I’m going to be disappointed, but if anyone has figured out how to do this, please let me know.
