It would be great to have the ability in the Plex web interface to take short segments of video and turn them into sharable clips or gifs. This is would probably require updated support from the backend transcoder, but building clips is what it already does to support HLS streaming.
Motivation
You’re watching a show, just witnessed something you absolutely want to share with family/friends, and want to be able to do that without needing someone else to have already clipped it, or to edit the video yourself (let alone having the software to do so).
Web-Interface
The interface wouldn’t need to be very advanced (at least to start). It could be as simple as a single button to Start/Stop the clipping, followed by a dialog asking what to do with the clip. Eventually, perhaps the timeline scrubber could be improved to drag some type of open/close anchors. Down the line maybe even the ability to overlay text for the gifs.
GIFS
I’m mostly interested in the clips, but it seems smart to support GIF creation as well. This could be customized by asking how many seconds apart to grab frames in the output dialog.
Sharing
In terms of sharing the clips/gifs, this could start as simply initiating a file download (which we can already do for the original video). Eventually this could grow to actually storing the clips long-term for sharing with family via Plex Home, or creating external links for those servers with remote access.
Branding
Plex could add the option of including the Plex logo/url into the output for marketing purposes.
Fair Use
I’m sure the idea of sharing media immediately conjures visions of lawyers, but short clips and memes have generally been considered fair use. Downloading the clips locally should be of no concern, and in the event the feature did evolve to sharing external links, Plex could impose a reasonable maximum time limit to encourage responsible use.
