I consider myself a digital-pack-rat, or as I prefer to call myself an archivist. As such I collect lots of things and categorize them as I discover patterns in what I collect. I love Plex. I’ve been using it for several years and it’s great for serving up my multimedia content on the fly via the Plex Web interface. But you can imagine with my tendencies, it has become a very large system. At the moment I have 22 movie libraries, 15 tv libraries and 28 music libraries. That’s a total of 65 libraries. As such, the one thing that annoys me the most and I know is a simple little thing to add in to Plex is a means to filter what is being shown by type.
After my last tear down and reinstallation of Plex I held off on adding the music in until others in my household started asking for the music. Why? Because scrolling through an extra 28 categories on top of the main 37 I primarily use Plex for is such an annoyance. The media should be there and playable when we want it to be, but it should work around us too. We mostly watch our shows and the occasional movie. It would be a lot simpler to browse to what we want if we had a means to filter the listed libraries by type of media.
For instance if I know I want to watch a scifi movie and I’ve been watching TV shows, I should be able to select a filter that shows only the movie libraries, then I can quickly select the library I want, instead of scrolling and scrolling… and scrolling some more to get to the scifi movie library.
Plex is already very smart and is aware of the types of content within it, making a little option to filter or show all of the libraries is hopefully a very easy thing to do.
I’ve mocked up what this might look like on the library sidebar. Other areas of the interface are probably as easy to accommodate too.
I am probably missing something, but why not use the built-in genres and possibly labels?
That would especially be helpful with items that fit into multiple categories.
Sometimes they are not easily accessible, but then you can vote for:
…and the last two also have notes on how to create smart playlists from there…never tried it though
Those filters exist, but you have to let go this excessive habit of creating a separate library for every minutely different material.
You can filter within a library. Not the libraries themselves.
Dividing your music into 28 libraries is very annoying, indeed. Making even a modestly diversified playlist must be a nightmare… That’s what ‘Genre’ tags are for.
Side note: Anime OVAs are perfectly fine to have within the normal Anime series library, in the Season 0. That is where they reside on TheTVDB.
@OttoKerner said:
Those filters exist, but you have to let go this excessive habit of creating a separate library for every minutely different material.
You can filter within a library. Not the libraries themselves.
Dividing your music into 28 libraries is very annoying, indeed. Making even a modestly diversified playlist must be a nightmare… That’s what ‘Genre’ tags are for.
Side note: Anime OVAs are perfectly fine to have within the normal Anime series library, in the Season 0. That is where they reside on TheTVDB.
Because this reflects the structure on the hard drives, which makes it easier for me to admin.
Because this is how I choose to do it.
I don’t do playlists. I don’t do anything the way you probably do. I’m unique like that.
This isn’t a hard thing to program in via css. Just a little CSS item labeling with a little code and this is an easy win for anyone.
Plex didn’t come with a manual that says, “We’re only gonna let you create 1 music library, 1 movie library and 1 tv library.” It was open enough to let me define things the way I want. Amazon doesn’t have only one category for any of their products. Neither do lots of other online catalogs. And they all provide simple category based filters. The Android Play store doesn’t have only a Games category and no subcategories.
I don’t trust the “smart” human-hands-off way of cataloging things to adhere to my own personal perceptions and tastes. If I wanna classify a band as symphonic metal and some database somewhere says it’s progressive metal, then I have the right to ignore that. Nevermind the whole Plex-Dance issue, which seems to have gotten worse as massive improvements are made. Plex is still ignoring the ID3 tags in my music and going off of what some algorithm determines is my music.
These are standalone Ovas, for when I want to watch a short series instead of a full blown anime series of 12+ episodes. The OVAs you speak of are in the “specials” folders for that anime in their respective folders.
Because creating a library the way I want is an easier solution than having to edit each item to reflect the labeling/genres I want.
You might consider it a minutia of difference, but to me it’s large enough to classify differently and this is how I choose to do that.
2+3+5+8+9: I agree. Plex lets you do it how you see fit and it’s a good think that you can do it. After all, we all do thinks differently.
I understand that. It is just not something you must do. I have my movies spread out over currently 3 drives. But I don’t move things around to collect all movies of a particular genre onto one drive. This would lead to frequent “move orgies” as the drives get full and fuller.
Instead I create a few subfolders on each drive which reflect the names of my libraries. Then I point my libraries to “their” respective subfolders on all of my drives. (You can do that - pointing a plex library to more than one location.)
A little fly in the ointment: One has to take a look at the mediainfo in Plex to see on which drive a particular movie resides, yes. But I rarely need to visit the movie files directly, that is what plex is there for.
If you metatags are well kempt, you can tell Plex to do that. Move the ‘Local Media Assets’ to the top under Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Plex Premium Music.
Also edit your music library and tick the checkbox ‘Use embedded metatags’. From then on, every album you add into your music library doesn’t get its metadata overridden by Gracenote data. Existing albums you need to Plex Dance though as the crucial metadata only get read when adding an album freshly.
A proper folder structure helps immensely, to even keep similarly named full album and EP releases nicely separated.
