There doesn’t appear to be a good solution for handling concert movies which have their song tracks broken into individual movie files. What would be a better alternatives if if there was separate naming standard with an option this that treats all of the tracks for a concert (assuming that the track number is the first part of the name) so that all the concert tracks are played in series with no breaks between tracks.
All of the work-arounds that I have seen are pretty clunky. Multi-part movies is not intended for this purpose (and has an 8 file limit) and the other work arounds use extras are even clunkier. The only sure-fire way to get it right seems to stitch all of the song tracks into a single media file using a tool that runs on Windows, though I am sure a Linux or Mac version probably exists out there. However, if you want to be able to jump to the song tracks like chapters and have each chapter be the track name that requires some other tool where you can add chapters to a file. While that works, it means that you have to perform two separate and manual operations: (1) stitching the track files into a single media file and (2) using the track length from the original files, put chapter markers as appropriate with track names as the chapter titles. I suppose this is something that could be scripted to make less cubersome, but it seems that adding some settings options to accommodate “tracked” movies or even movies that for some reason are broken into it’s chapters, as it is basically the same problem. (I haven’t even encountered this, but it’s essentially the same problem.)
For concerts that are all one file, I guess the trick would be to find a source online that might be able to break down the concert intro tracks. I know that for live music database like etree and the like has this sort of information, but that may not be appropriate for concert videos. Of course there are often multiple recordings of the same concert with different times so it gets complicated. This might not be as easily solveable- at least not like the case were tracks are separate.
The same issue goes for DVDA or Blue-Ray Audio music discs which have some basic media experience (usually still photos and the like) so you play the audio in 5.1 surround as well as have the visual component as well. I know most people just strip the audio data for these which is fine, but sometimes having the video accompaniment is enjoyable.
In any case, instead of having to manually process them (which is definitely a pain) this just has Plex handle the files with minimal processing. The only thing it would have to do is play the files in sequence in such a way that you don’t notice the file breaks, which presumably it already can do with multipart movie files. It seems like this feature doesn’t require too much development investment since it’s just a different way of organizing existing features that would avoid having to remux the original movie files to accomodate plex.
Hope this is one that gets addressed!
