How to handle different versions of the same movie

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#:current
Player Version#:

I have a couple movies with the theatrical and directors cut. I also have movies that were split on 2 discs (LOTR) and thus are 2 separate video files.

  1. I have combined them, however when pressing “play version” there is no known way to label them to distinguish them.

  2. I could separate them, however it pulls the same metadata and they look indistinguishable.

Any recommendations?

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LOTR: merge the files into one large file [HowTo]: joining multi-part movies files with MKVtoolnix GUI

Multiple versions: use the “Split” command, then edit the items’ titles in Plex to reflect the version. The file name is right there in the “Edit” window, on the “Info” tab.

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Thanks. If I edit the file name I didn’t see different versions of the cover art. Won’t it still pull the same (or wrong) cover art?

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If you manually split an item that’s reflecting different editions/cuts of the same movie, you can manually update the title (e.g. from Leon the Professional to Leon the Professional (Director's Cut)) and assign a poster of your choice. Sometimes, the repositories used by Plex have different posters for different cuts – however different cuts usually don’t get their own records on those databases (a few exceptions apply… e.g. there’s an own entry for the Rogue Cut of X-Men: Days of Future Past).

There’s a very popular and long running feature suggestion to improve the handling of different versions/cuts of the same movie
https://forums.plex.tv/t/multiple-cuts-of-movie/20550/489

As per Otto’s response above… if you’re dealing with different parts of the same movie (e.g. taken from different discs as with LOTR) – you should always aim at merging them e.g. using MKVToolNix. This will give you a single file for Plex to deal with. While it’s also possible to stack the individual parts based on your file naming (e.g. including a suffix like - pt1, - pt2…), that is not supported by all clients.

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I forgot that editing the title would protect it from being overwritten. Makes sense. Thanks.

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