I have a rip of a Blu-Ray video calibration disk, and when I created the rip (using the great MakeMKV), I went ahead and dumped all of the “titles” from the Blu-Ray to separate MKV files. Now I have a single “Movie” that has over 200 separate MKV files, each representing a “title” on the Blu-Ray disk.
How in the world should I store this within my Plex Media Server?
First hope was that Plex Media Server would just support BDMV files directly, but it doesn’t. I understand why it doesn’t for many reasons, but this is definitely a perfect use case to justify such a feature. Alas, it doesn’t help me today.
Second alternative was to take advantage of the “stacked” movie feature. Unfortunately, according to the documentation, there are some serious issues:
Not all Plex Apps support playback of stacked media
Only stacks up to 8 parts are supported
Next up, I could potentially leverage Local Media Assets, and pick one of the parts to represent the “main” movie, and then make the balance be flagged as “Scenes” or something, but this seems bonkers.
Am I missing something? Is there a better way to handle content like this?
Unfortunately, the “bonkers” answer might be the best one.
Wait until you come across something you want to include in Plex, and the most logical storage methodology is to define it as its own personal Library…
I’m not really trying to be mean here, but unless things fall into simple Movies and TV Shows, and can be easily found on TheMovieDB or TheTVDB, or IMDB… Plex has to be persuaded to accept the media by beating it gently with some sort of hammer. Many of us find the Local Media Assets and Home Movie Libraries to be the best compromise. Hopefully there will be new media and Library types in the future.
Yeah, sadly, even if I do use a “Personal Media Library” for it, the order of the titles is pointless, and doesn’t really match any sort of rhyme or reason. This is one of those times I really wish Plex supported BD rips directly, with their menus and navigation structures
As far as I can tell, there is basically no way for me to do this in any sane fashion.
And then… after spending countless hours of meticulously curating the perfect “Home Movie Library” making sure that every file has a Poster and the proper Fanart Background… then Plex can jump in and do THIS to you:
@cleverdevil said:
Next up, I could potentially leverage Local Media Assets, and pick one of the parts to represent the “main” movie, and then make the balance be flagged as “Scenes” or something, but this seems bonkers.
I’d indeed go with the ‘scenes’ approach.
Though 200 items seem excessive of course. I’m pretty sure makemkv ripped duplicate files (it also rips very often some ‘multi-chapters files’ for no apparent reason).
Go over your files and pick the ones with the test videos you would actually use.
I had a similar objective – create a media library able to group and sequence/order many videos.
The media I wanted to organise is not real-world TV shows or Movies (either short films or your regular length movie). My objective focused on organising and presenting many university lecture recordings. On the surface, Plex doesn’t seem to be build for this purpose, but if I could somehow make it work it would be a very effective and efficient solution.
It wasn’t attractive to create a “personal media” type library and to organise media (grouping and ordering/sequencing) by creating multiple parts in the video name (e.g. “Uni Lectures – Sociology A1 – 2016 – April 26 – Small town social groups dynamics”). Two problems with this solution design:
Long video names.
One very long list of media. Too cumbersome to scroll through.
I found creating a Plex library of type “TV show” and ensuring media had a basic set of meta tags allowed me to organise and present videos in a much better structure to improve end user navigation and and access to many, many videos.
Here is how I applied this solution design:
Plex Library name: “Uni Lectures”
Plex Library type: “TV Shows”
MP4 media tag “TV Show” = “Sociology A1”
MP4 media tag “TV Series” = “2016”
MP4 media tag “TV Episode” = “20160426”
MP4 media tag “Name” = “Small town social group dynamics”
MP4 media tag “Long Description” = “Short summary of lecture”
I use MetaZ (free) and Subler (free) to add/edit/remove MP4/M4V media meta-tags.
I discovered using libraries of type “TV Show” provided me with several “bonus” features:
Libraries of type “TV Show” and “Movie” accommodates videos parts (Up to maximum of 8 parts I think). I could add “-part1” “-part2” etc and have Plex present the the multiple parts as one video.
For each “video” I can create multiple versions (480p, 720p, 1080p). If the media shares the same meta-tag information and the multiple versions for each lecture (“episode”) are stored in one folder Plex will automatically present just one “episode” (yet provide mechanism for the user to select play a version depending on their requirements – device and network access i.e. location).
I can create and apply artwork. For each lecture series (i.e. show) I create poster artwork – place the file named “show.jpg” in the lecture (i.e. show) folder. I can also create poster artwork for each lecture “episode” – embedded into each MP4 file as a poster image.
If I remember correctly when I was testing various solution designs for libraries of type “Personal Media” Plex Media Server will not automatically group multiple versions of media.
I have thought it might be useful if Plex Media Server had features to support a greater variety of library types. Imagine if Plex could support creating specialised library types by nominating which meta-tags are used to group and/or sequence media. Plex development team would have to evaluate whether or not to develop a feature like this very carefully. It might be difficult to develop, difficult to create simple enough user interface, difficult (too complex) for the average user to use effectively. But if executed well it might be a really good feature opening up Plex to many more applications and customers!
The mechanism and solution design I describe here may (or may not) be suitable for your particular scenario and application. I wish you all the best.
My issue is that I frankly don’t have the time or desire to go through 200+ individual files from this type of content to shoehorn it into Plex’s restrictions. There are many types of content that come from physical media like Blu-Ray discs that, once “ripped”, will become hundreds of files, and no solution that requires the user to tediously go through every file, rename it, and place it into some folder structure is going to be worth it.
Based upon this experience, I firmly believe that Plex needs to add full support for Blu-Ray disc rips at some point in the future. I recognize that this is (and likely should be) a lower priority feature, as the majority of content works wonderfully with Plex’s current capabilities. But, I used to believe it should be a “never” feature, and now I think it needs to be an “eventually” feature.
EDIT: I’ll also add that the MPV player that now drives Plex Media Player actually supports directly playing Blu-Ray rips, so its much more feasible going forward…
