Currently, we can only create smart playlists within a single library at a time. For those of us with more extensive setups, we may have multiple libraries of the same type (movies, TV, etc). It would be great to allow for us to create smart playlists that include content from multiple libraries!
For example: If I want to create a “Holiday Specials” playlist, I must currently do so manually. This is because there are TV episodes, movies and cartoons which all fit this description, and all 3 of these categories are separate libraries.
I envision a Plex world where I don’t have to scan through multiple directories every time I add a new movie/tv show to add new content to a playlist and then do the same thing on every account the playlist exists on (separate issue).
Instead, wouldn’t it be nice if you could have dynamic playlists that allow you to set filters that simply define what the playlist is? The big draw for me is in large general playlists like genres (comedy, fantasy, sci-fi, etc) but there’s quite a lot you can do with the existing filtering system.
To simulate a sort of TV-like experience I made a playlist with every tv show/movie and I can shuffle play it to just get random stuff to play. Trouble is, I have to go and re-add everything every time new content is added or specifically scan for that new content which is basically the same amount of effort.
Ultimately this is a simple task that would be easy to automate with a server job so us lazy humans can just sit back and enjoy.
Updated:
Smart Playlists account of most of the behavior I’d like so the only remaining tidbit is multi-library support for Smart Playlists.
A part of this is already possible today.
It is called ‘Smart’ playlist.
But a smart playlist can only contain items from one library, contrary to the original request.
Mod-Edit:
Doing some pre-spring cleaning of the forum I found those 2 suggestions which cover the same scope. Usually we point to the guidelines/rules for the feature suggestion forum and close those duplicates in order to avoid new duplicates from distracting votes from existing ones.
Here we have kind of a special situation as both requests already had votes .
Therefore I’ve opted to merge both threads.
To those who had previously voted in the [Request] Multi-Library Smart Playlists - Automatically adds new content based on configured filters thread… – this merge has freed up your (2) votes again. Please feel free to re-add them here if you still support this suggestion.
My apologies for the inconvenience.
Use case: I have labels for topics that I apply in all my libraries. I would like to create a playlist with all the movies that have a given label across all my libraries
For smart playlists, currently it seems to only pull the movies that fit the label from the library I created the playlist from.
For regular playlists, it seems I can manually add the movies from several libraries
**Ask: it’d be great to be able to create smart playlists across libraries **
Please please Plex add a way to combine different types of libraries (movies, tv shows, other videos) into single smart collection. This comes up a lot on other forums it seems.
Would be really nice to have this. As a workaround, I have two separate music libraries, and a third called “All Music”. It works well enough, but feels like an unnecessarily complicated.
This is the one feature I’ve been waiting for, making mixed smart collections (movies and tv) that I could throw onto the homescreen. It would also be great if the “random sort” could be rate limited to something like once every hour or 12 hours for the smart collection so that whatever it is you’re looking for doesn’t disappear the moment you try to go back to browsing.
