On thing that would be extremely useful is the ability to set the time a movie or show will start when that item is selected.
Example: VERY often it’s either just easier to do youself, or something you may download has already done it; merging multiple (for example TV shows) shows into a single file, like short cartoon classics, than it is to chop each one up individually.
Plex scanner is intelligent enough to split them up and display them as the different episodes if you name them like this for example:
Underdog - s01e04-e05 - (1964) - Go Snow, Part 1 & Go Snow, Part 2 - [SD 480p x264 640x480] [MP3 2ch].avi
It’ll show up as the correct show name and part 1 or part 2, as 2 different episodes. (awesome!)
however, when you go to watch each individual episode they both still start at the beginning. It would be great if while editing the show’s tags (etc.) you could also enter the start time that the show will start playing from. Then for example, for Part 1 I’d just leave it alone and it would start at the beginning, but for Part 2 I could set it to start at 5:34 of the video file, and then when that episode is started it would automatically begin playing from 5:34 of that file. While watching a show that has a custom start time, if you still want to watch anything before that time you can still just rewind as desired.
I want this feature badly. Multiple episodes in a single file is common enough, especially with cartoons that show multiple episodes in a single airing.
I would not mind having to manually set every episode at all!
If the developers want this done by a naming convention the way we set multiple episodes, perhaps something such as S01E01-E02sec900 to indicate episode 2 starts 900 seconds in could work?
I too have this EXACT problem with THIS cartoon series. I have the Underdog episodes “stacked” and Plex sees them as individual episodes but as mentioned above, each one starts at the beginning of the common “stacked” file.
Very annoying.
This occurs often with DVR recorded shows, often recording a couple of minutes before start time, would be nice to set the start time in the movie metadata so anyone who watches it starts at that point.
I would love to see this feature implemented even if the trade off for it was a forced transcode.
Since you can pass start timecode and duration into FFMPEG. this capability would be an odd thing to leave out, I presume it made it to the universal encoder feature list. But like all things programming, I’m sure this will come with a whole host of issues to what seems so simple, haha.
LOVE this idea. Mondo Media, for example, sells DRM-free copies of its web series, but they combine entire season into single files. Cutting them up is a royal pain.
I can’t believe years later, and with a lot of supporting voices this is still not added. It seems like it can’t be that hard of an enhancement to add. Even YouTube does it for their videos simply by adding a parameter to their URL, like this:
This is a highly desirable feature. It’s not as trivial as it may appear, but it is quite doable.
The underlying capability is, as several have observed, is probably adequately present in the open source Plex server layer.
Most of the hard work, however, will be in the UI layer, which is not open source.
To the non-geeks on this thread, here are some of the challenges:
The image that you want to show in the Movies page is not the image that is at the start point, which is probably blank. It is typically some variable time afterwards. Should it be the title card? Where exactly is it?
Given that the display point and the entry point are different, we probably will need to establish a standard library (think some JSON data) that includes the start point and display point and some other metadata for all of the shorts on a particular movie object.
I’m sure that the fans will crowdsource the data, but establishing the underlying machinery is a fair amount of work, most of which is not in the open source part of the project.
@STaRDoGG : as suggested by @BigWheel in your other thread, there is actually already another feature suggestion discussing that very feature.
I suggest you comment/vote in that other thread in order to avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes from that one (or having 2 suggestions fighting over the votes for the same feature). Unless I’m missing some unique aspect of this thread, I suggest we close it again to avoid that.
With regards to the use case for multiple episodes in a single file… there’s some other suggestions discussing e.g. to display a single entry in your library while showing it contains multiple episodes. I suppose that might be easier than actually entering the individual episode start/end times (if you have those you could alternatively split the file in 1 file per episode).
…
although I just noticed there’s yet another suggestion that’s describing exactly what you’re asking for (specifically for multi-episode files)
I’m not real fussy about the actual method it’s done as long as I’m able to differentiate each “episode” of the single file as “its own episode” so to speak.
Regarding the other threads: I’d like to just take a moment to pat myself on the back for having the original idea, pre-dating those threads by 3, 4 and 5 years, respectively; those guys should searched the forums and chimed in on mine instead.
Fair enough. While your suggestion seems to have been created first, they were able to collect a few more votes (though not all that many in some cases)
That’s literally about users posting +1 instead of voting or bump for the sake of seeing some recent activities on their thread. Not about not voting or contributing to that thread.
