@cayars said:
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.
cayars, very good to know. I have not seen this yet, can you give an example of some clients that already do this? Been waiting for this for a while, so excited to hear it could be in sight.
Sure thing. Check out the new UI for XBOX if you have one or download PMP2 for the PC.
Both use this new UI style which can pull info from multiple servers blending the results into the UI.
What is will do is show you all the different libs you have on the different servers. What it won’t do is combine libs with the same name. So if you have “Movies” on 2 or more servers you will get 2 or more “Movie” libraries.
But if you had Movies and Home Video on one server and TV Shows, Music and Sports on a 2nd server you will get each library show up without having to flip back and forth between servers.
I can confirm this grouping on PMP 2 on Windows and Mac. You get to choose from the general Plex categories (Movies, Shows, Music, Photos, Videos) and then there is a sub nav for what server to choose from. You still have to go to a server and see what’s on it, but it’s an easier way to navigate servers. It would be nice if you could select multiple servers at once to group all their content in one area. Maybe it will come from this.
@tmar89 said:
You still have to go to a server and see what’s on it, but it’s an easier way to navigate servers. It would be nice if you could select multiple servers at once to group all their content in one area. Maybe it will come from this.
Not sure what you mean by this? The UI can show you libraries from EVERY server you have access to.
@cayars said:
Not sure what you mean by this? The UI can show you libraries from EVERY server you have access to.
What I mean is that you still only are looking at one library at a time. The checkbox on the server nav bar shows what server’s library I am looking at currently. It doesn’t allow you to select multiple ones to see the combined content.
I think I finally understand the difference in perspectives here: if you are running PMP2, you only see the combined library in “TV full screen” mode. In any other mode (like I was using), you only see content from one server at a time. And, if you are running the Android TV app on the Nvidia Shield (like me), you only see content from one server at a time.
And even on the Mac PMP2 in TV full screen mode, there’s a difference in continue watching and on deck across TV and movies. And the Home tab displays content from only one server. There’s an unused Photos tab. Live TV is buried. And custom home video categories are commingled rather than displayed as separate items (e.g. “Exercise” and “Lessons”).
yes 1 front end library connected to multiple back end servers to populate that library would be ideal, im not sure what PMP2 is but to have something like this across all devices is what i am looking for.
@cayars
Do you have a list or know what platform UI’s support this?
I know the latest version of plex media player support it in full screen mode. I was wondering if you had any knowledge of if/when it would be coming to TvOS, Roku, etc.
It’s also available on the Xbox client. Those are the only released to public versions as far as I remember. As far as schedules go an Employee would need to comment on anything more.
Even the web client supports this to an extent - but you have to search for something, but instead of selecting something from the list - choose instead to “search all servers”. So if I type in Maggie Smith for example and then choose to “search all servers” I will see a results screen that shows results from all the servers instead of just the one I am currently on.
Personally I do 95% of my plex viewing from “On Deck” so I’d welcome an aggregated on deck view showing next up content from things I’m watching on different servers.
Unless I’m missing something it doesn’t do that.
I can see how merging all the libraries could get messy but I’d make an argument for on deck being a special case (it is anyway, it has to track episodes so it has a different behaviour to the other views).
Me too! I spend hours adding generic posters and backgrounds to my racing videos so as to avoid spoilers, but I now have 3 servers - the NAS itself, my MacBook Pro, and now a new Mac Mini (the NAS was unable to play some files and my MacBook is not always on.) I have more than a year of motorcycle racing videos with spoiler thumbnails that were fixed on only 1 of the 3 servers. Wouldn’t it be great if I only had to do it once!
Any movement on this?
I think the way they implemented it now isn’t too bad. You’re able to go to Movies and then see all the servers that provide Movie libraries. I still wish they were able to group everything together but then that would require constantly polling and pulling data from tens to hundreds of libraries at a time and could consume a lot of memory and time.
PLUS 1 to getting an aggregated view of all plex media servers!
Plex any input as to whether this will ever happen?
It is unlikely this will happen. At best there may be something with similar elements but not exactly as described and not in the near future.
+1 on this feature. A combined view of all servers. That would be epic. I would even pay extra for it. Thanks!
this was attempted pre-uno (combining libraries views of TYPE instead of by server) and was roundly hated. see all threads about pre-uno, in in particular the roku threads where the pre-uno UI went live to mass horror.
If for some reason you werent there or didn’t see it, instead of having server > libraries, the top levels were:
Movies - content from all servers of type movie
TV - content from all servers of type tv
Music - content from all servers of type music
etc etc etc
essentially each type abstracted (hid) the server, so the user would see only content and not which server or library type (if one had multiple movie libraries they were sort of combined).
I can’t recall the specifics of that implementation (thank god) because it didn’t last that long when all the public outrage occured.
But the whole point was essentially to group content together regardless of server (ie show all movies or tv combined regardless of which server).
the ironic part of this, is that this feature has a whole 48 votes (as of this post) and somehow got implemented into a major ui inititive, while there are other much better requests with hundreds or thousands of votes which still are not implemented.
I think two views is the solution. Let people with multiple servers choose what view they want.
Main view is all movies/shows form all servers. Then you can go sub-view where you look into specific servers. Also, the main view with all servers should be customizable so that you can choose which servers it gather info from. Basically custom view. That way, everyone’s happy. I would love that feature 
