Hopefully what I’m asking makes sense. I recently recently ripped all my DVDs and added them to Plex. Due to a number of reasons, I won’t be adding my movies on Bluray to Plex anytime soon. However, it would be nice if I could still use Plex as my source/inventory of all my movies. While browsing my movies in Plex, it would be nice to see my Bluray movies listed, and if I select a movie that is one of my Blurays, it could have a message that says something like “On Bluray Disc”. It could say that in the description somewhere or even when I pushed to play the movie. That would be my prompt to grab the Bluray disc out of my collection.
Make some dummy files named like they are the movies you have and let Plex catalog them like they are real movies. Of course they will not play but Plex will show them just fine.
As far as what is displayed just edit the metadata to say what you want.
If you want to do this, make a 1 minute video with the message “On BluRay”, it can be any video format plex supports (which is a lot) And then just copy the file and rename it for as many movies as you need.
Do a search for “You Tube Downloader” and I think you will find many tools to download videos from You Tube. There may have been some changes from when I actually did that but it should still produce some results.
There are also many free tools that can produce videos of any size.
Personally I would use avi format videos for that purpose because I have nearly no avi files in my system and it would make finding the dummys easy. If that does not matter then mp4s are a good choice because of ease of playback.
I’ll share my method and if you’re on Windows you might find it useful.
Merge the a reg file with the following content into your registry.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4\ShellNew]
"FileName"="template.mp4"
Plex will ignore zero byte files so you need some size so open Notepad and type a period. Save as template.mp4. Place this file in C:\Windows\ShellNew. If the ShellNew folder is missing, create it.
Voila!
I typically name the new mp4 as the movie name and place it in folder or same name.
teuks - Using your method, how do you know this movie is not in your Plex library? Doesn’t this generate an error when you try to play it (assuming you even try)?
Not sure what you’re asking but if it’s if how I know I’m not making a 2nd copy of a movie already there, I have everything in my libraries committed to memory so I wouldn’t do that.
If you’re asking what indication there is that the movie isn’t present it’s because those are kept in a separate library. I just use them as a record of stuff I’ve gotten rid of but can always put back. However, looking now it shows no video or audio track so that’s one way to know. Sorting by bitrate should put them all together.
I’ve never tried playing them until just now when you asked about it and it errors with “An error occurred trying to play…” on the web player.
