This would be an amazing enhancement. As I am in an apartment in an area that regular indoor OTA antennas do not work well or at all, I have two servers, one local with the majority of my media and one remote at a family member’s where I could set up DVR off their tower antenna. It is a pain to have to jump back and forth between the two servers and would be nice to have a way to see all libraries on a single view and merge libraries and media with the same name together and have the client pull from the best source (the same movie with the same file name, a setting to give preference to local vs remote or preference to higher quality or preference to better network bandwidth). Ideally, it would be nice to see this a ranking system for the client to choose where to pull content from as some might prefer quality but then if the first is the same then pull local over the remote.
This was thread was originally posted years ago and there have been many others closed and referenced to this one. Is there any timeline on when we might see something like this?
@sa2000 said:
This would need to be fully configurable option to allow for aggregation of library sections for owned servers.
Sad to see that Plex failed to follow your advice in PMP. This should have been configurable, so those who don’t want to see mingled servers don’t have to.
@sa2000 said:
This would need to be fully configurable option to allow for aggregation of library sections for owned servers.
Sad to see that Plex failed to follow your advice in PMP. This should have been configurable, so those who don’t want to see mingled servers don’t have to.
There is always hope that such a dashboard for managing a cluster of distributed Plex Media Server Libraries may one day be considered.
After cutting the cord from my cable provider and relying on my Plex server and specifically my friends’ Plex servers, this feature request is becoming increasingly important.
I use an Nvidia Shield to launch Plex and I do not have a keyboard in my living room. Having to go through the Search function each time and specifying All Servers (or one) is cumbersome.
@Hermankamp said:
+1 Looking to do this as well and would be a welcome addition already have 2 servers operational but have to manage 2 databases of media
You will still always have to manage the different servers independently. The client will just “combine” the different content from the servers into one “big” list.
NAS:
Photos
Music
Home Videos
Server1:
TV Shows
Server2:
Movies
Client Views (PMP2/Xbox)
Photos
Music
Home Videos
TV Shows
Movies
I would love this as i could use it as a way to basically double my bandwidth and add extra transcoding ability… I have two locations both with 12mb upload.Plex server currently only runs at one location, on an overclocked i7 4779k. I could split the media library across both locations and use the shield pro (have one at both locations) as a second server.
However swapping from server to server to find which has what content, is just too hard for my remote users.
Being able to make these appear as one movie and one tv library, and split the load (media location dependent) would be awesome.
You’d be able to have the same Storage Backend with multiple Plex servers accessing it.
Problem 1. Keeping the multiple servers Libraries in Sync.
Having Server A, with 100 Shows Server B, with 100 other shows. You could end up with lots of people watching a show on Server A but server B just sitting there idle, while Server A is at 100% CPU and transcoding failing.
If you’re spinning up multiple servers, they should be able to share the load between them.
+1 This is my biggest issue using Plex right now. I have a remote and local library. As they grow, it’s increasingly a pain to find media. I’d also love to be able to merge collections, etc.
I really would like a simple, “View all nearby servers” display option.
This is my biggest problem with Plex right now: we have our music, TV shows, and Live TV/DVR running on one server (NAS). And we have our movies on another server. So, family members need to switch between the two servers in settings to view specific types of content. This is really not user friendly for either family members or visitors.
In theory, I could run a single Plex server and create a network share on the first NAS to retrieve content served by the second NAS. But, as others have pointed out, (1) network shares are a potential point of failure, and (2) network shares create more latency and load (both network bandwidth and potentially transcoding).
I think a unified view of nearby (on LAN) servers would be simple for Plex to implement. To be clear, I am not asking for coordinated transcoding across servers, commingling of a library type (e.g. TV shows) across two servers into a single view, or including remote (WAN-based) servers, which might have too much latency. These are all valuable but are more complex than my ask.
UPDATE:
This appears to be more than just a library switching issue in the UI. I believe that voice search (on Nvidia Shield TV) fails to find a video asset if the last selected server didn’t contain that type of content. In my case, if the last user was watching TV (stored on server 1), then a video search for movies (which are stored on server 2) using Google voice search will fail to find a specific movie on Plex until the user opens Plex and switches back to the other server containing movies. However, a family member or visitor shouldn’t be expected to know what content is stored on what server.
This has been a feature request for so many years that it’s obvious plex doesn’t want or care about our opinions or concerns. I can’t believe that I may have to completely stop using plex because they won’t even message us back to say no. It’s like being completely ignored. Terrible company I guess. Can we at least get an update? Like come on. We have been asking for this for like 4 or 5 years.
Maybe you aren’t following what’s going on but Plex IS DOING EXACTLY THIS. Some of the newer clients do group the contents from multiple servers and these clients are content type based, not server based.
