At present, Plex determines what aspect ratio the posters for a particular thing should be based on what type of library it is. This works great most of the time; music album art tends to be 1:1, movie posters tend to be 2:3, etc. But sometimes it’s kind of obnoxious. For example, posters in Home Videos libraries use the same 2:3 aspect ratio that is normally used for movie posters. Home videos generally don’t have posters, so you end up with obnoxiously-cropped screenshots of the video, like this:
To me, the best solution would be an option to customize the aspect ratio of posters in the settings for each library. We don’t need arbitrary ratios – you could just provide a few presets. It might look something like this:
(If adding a new configurable option is deemed too much work, then maybe you guys could at least change the ratio for home videos libraries from 2:3 to 16:9?)
I’d like this feature to be added as well. I have a Music Videos library, but because Other Videos libraries default to 16:9 thumbnails, the album art used for the thumbnails gets cropped. Only the Music library has 1:1 thumbnails by default, which wouldn’t serve my needs for this library.
I was really bummed to see the aspect change come through on a home videos library I have. I had curated so much poster art to the previous aspect ratio and its all been ruined. I really hope this becomes a feature.
I personally dislike the movie poster thumbnails look for the “Other Video” library. The option to display thumbnails in 16:9 landscape style would look so much better for those of us with libraries of music videos, home movies, youtube content etc. I have a very hard time even thinking of things that would fall into the “other video” category that use a vertical thumbnail. It would be a very nice and long awaited touch considering this is a media organizer, the current format looks cluttered and far from organized.
For that matter, a way to scroll through your home video to select the screen show you want for the poster or thumbnail in a TV series if TVDB doesn’t have your show. Having to pick from the randomly selected screen grabs often results in a poster of nothing.
You are currently already able to select your own screen shot for a home video thumbnail actually. You just need to have it saved as a file. The problem is your screen shot will become cropped when you are scrolling through your library and then truly look like nothing. Plex the other video section really does need some thumbnail ratio options for it to really be functional.
Yeah, but who wants to manually go in and grab screens when PLEX already is grabbing screens at random? Let’s just give us the option to pick which scene we want to grab.
For what it’s worth to the conversation, I actually agree that the movie poster aspect ratio is worse for the home video type library. It’s just that for me, I had so much time invested into curating screenshots to fit the size it was. I think it looks better now it just wrecked a lot of work i put in. I at least wish I knew it would have been coming. I’d change it back if I could at least until I was ready to invest the time to redo the posters again.
I would like this as well however disagree with setting home videos to 16:9 as the only change. All my ‘Other Video’ libraries have custom posters and the recent change to force a landscape view of these libraries has ruined that. Please just provide the option for the two grid views that currently exist - the grid view currently being used for Movies and for Other Videos should just be an option for all libraries.
I think this is the point though. I don’t think movie poster aspect is worse. I like the consistency. I enjoy making custom posters for my home videos and other videos I use for those libraries. I hate with a passion just seeing a screen grab. How media is displayed is always going to be a personal preference and giving us more setting options for this would then just please everyone. Forcing a change will always wreck the work many have put into their libraries.
And I have hundreds of movies that I don’t want to have to create custom posters for. So I’m stuck with landscape which is fine if I get to pick the screen grab in PLEX instead of being limited to the few that PLEX decides to offer.
The Other Videos section is very versatile and can be used for a lot of things. I use it for music videos personally, and I have spent a LOT of time creating posters for them, based on the single cover. I hate that the look of them is completely wrong now, and I absolutely do not want a screenshot for the preview. I think that choosing the aspect ratio would be the best idea to please a variety of users with different use cases.
Agreed. I was just browsing one of my libraries that is considered “Other Videos” (my Rifftrax collection that I don’t want to be a “Movies” library and then weirdness happens with my actual movie library) and it forces a widescreen aspect ratio on the thumbnail even though I manually selected normal “portrait” poster images for each video, so they get cropped off. I’d love to be able to just select the aspect ratio I want for the library so I can choose what is most appropriate.
I don’t believe this was always the case, either. This irritates me so much after the work I put into finding and sometimes creating these posters that I definitely would have noticed before today, and there was an update to the program I was prompted to install yesterday. Was there a recent change to how this was handled, at least in the Windows and web clients (haven’t tested on my smart tv app yet)?
What’s exceptionally odd is it works just fine in collections, but if you go to the library tab it goes back to these horrible landscape tiles.
EDIT: This also broke the “Folders” view. This used to still be a tile view of the movies, just with the folders as tiles at the top (the alignment was always slightly off if the folders didn’t fill an exact number of complete rows, but it was fine). Now I select that view and it JUST shows “Detail View”, I can’t keep it on tiles. I really need that to be un-borked asap, that is the only way we browse this library so that long series don’t clutter things up and are contained in those folders.
In addition, collections for other videos are still portrait. So now I am completely stuck with an incorrect aspect ratio for all of my videos in either collections or libraries. And if I pin to homepage, same problem. Can this please get fixed? It’s really frustrating!
Like many in this thread i have spent a significant amount of time creating [portrait] artwork for home home video library which is now displayed inconsistently both within the web view and across Android [TV & Mobile] platforms.
I can’t imaging that the Plex team would intentionally plan to implement inconsistencies in poster display format in the OV libraries … however that’s where we are now.
If you edit a video in the library to change the poster - portrait posters are displayed correctly and you can select and successfully save one.
The portrait poster is then cropped to landscape in the grid, detail and individual views … unless you view in a collection where the portrait view is displayed as portrait. Selecting an individual video from the collection view then takes you to the video - where the poster is displayed in landscape!!!
The Android apps [correctly] display the poster in portrait at all levels.
So … i’m left with a situation where i can’t fix this … I could:-
Make all new landscape artwork for hundreds of videos and it will look OK in SOME [but not all] parts of the web view but look bad in my android apps
Leave the portrait artwork which will look ok in SOME [but not all] parts of the web app and OK in the android apps
