Love this! Thank you. Please don’t take the next as a criticism. This is how Plex has designed their database.
Music Videos - that should be handled by Plex. They need to integrate Music Videos into the Music Library.
4K - mentioned earlier: a Plex deficiency. They need to fix. It shouldn’t be something we fix with libraries.
Adult - these are genres. Restrictions should be set by labels. Plex already provides these. Plex is already designed properly unless you think Adult media is something different than “movies.” If you do, why? *They are movies.* You need to assign a genre to them and provide restrictions base on labels. That is proper database usage. Plex handles this well.
Christmas/Holiday - again genres. You need to manually assign the genre with customer tags. I use: Christmas, Classic Christmas, Easter, July 4th, etc. I have created these lists on TMDB that Kometa uses to build collections as well. My Smart Collections allow me to excluded/include Christmas/holidays as appropriate based on the assigned genres. Libraries are not needed, not should they be. Elan, are a listening (for music)?!!
Concerts - this one probably should fall under Music. I’ve haven’t fully thought it through, but it goes along with music videos. Plex needs to address.
Exercise Videos - I believe these are TV Shows. Again, genres.
So, “Concerts” might be a needed library to handle something lacking in Plex, that I haven’t mentioned prior. Think that puts total needed libraries up to 6 (maybe 7). Again, Plex DOES need to deal with Music Videos and 4K. Concerts should be dealt with too by Plex. That keeps libraries to 5 (Movies, TV Shows, Home Videos, Music, Photos). I could see Home Videos and Photos being combined so 4 libraries.
This isn’t a thread about what is good, but what would make the new UI better. We are stuck moving forward, so how do we wish to build on the NEW and make it better?
Thread about “what is good” would be non-existent. As far as making this better? There is nothing to build on. Even biblical times they knew to build on rock, not sand. We’ve had it what - a month? Plex has become my last resort, I check with Roku first to see if a streaming service (especially Netflix because let’s face it, Amazon is the king of crappy interfaces) has what I want to watch even if I own it and it’s on my Plex server. How to make the new UI better? Honestly I feel why bother? Plex has never responded much to users. Hunker down and try to survive until the next update and hope they hire somebody competent. And see if the old Roku standalone that hasn’t been touched in a year can be persuaded to not update apps. Gonna be weird to have a Roku plugged into a Roku tv but if that’s what it takes.
Problem with having Adult intermixed with regular movies is that I used a dedicated agent for Adult/XXX movies. So combining them really doesn’t work.
Regarding some of the exercise videos I have - they were never on TV (at least not that I know of).
Regarding Concerts (and Music Videos), the issue I run into is that I have some that I don’t necessarily have the music for on my Plex server, so combining those with music doesn’t necessarily work.
I’d also have to see how smart collections based on genres are presented in the various apps. That’s been one of the nice things about libraries - they’ve always been easy to see, get to, etc. and now Plex has totally thrown that out the window. I do know that collections show as a horizontal scrolling list, but I’ve got 118 movies in my Holiday/Christmas library so that doesn’t really show well in a collection. Yes, I could use Categories, but now you’ve added another click (along with navigating to the Christmas/Holiday category). I also have both Movies and TV Shows in that library.
Libraries just give an admin more control over how they want to present their server contents.
I understand why you feel this way, and with their recent layoffs, all the more.
However, I have seen Plex respond appropriately when needed several times. Plex is listening. We have the opt-out option for Discover for one; that was HUGE! Plex knows they are in deep s*** with this new UI. This thread is a desire to help Plex dig out from that pit. They don’t want to lose users, nor do we as users wish to see Plex go away. That would be horrible.
Again, there are bugs and there are loses in features. Those are different and I think Plex is getting the message on all of those. But, there is a large out pouring of frustration with the new UI. I’m trying to gather the constructive complaints about what is wrong with the new UI and provide those to Plex. I know they are reading this thread and will take it all onboard. We just need to settle down and express our needs to Plex. Saying we “hate” something is valid, but it doesn’t help Plex know where we would like to see things move forward.
So I think here is where we have a disconnect. I was just thinking about @Lazarus_Long ‘s libraries, and I was wondering what we would all do if they were physical discs. I bet none of us would organize them the same.
Some of us would organize them alphabetically.
Some of us would organize them by genre.
Some would put the workout discs in the workout room, the adult films in the bedroom, the regular movies out for guest consumption…
Some of us would be heathens and put them on the shelves all willy nilly.
The point is that Plex keeps prescribing grouping all these things as a “best practice” and while that may be true from a certain point of view, it really doesn’t meet a wider audience’s actual needs.
Catering to multiple libraries by genre allows you to organize all your movies together, while allowing others to get more granular. The only reason I can think of to force it down into the smaller widget is to be able to park their stuff closer to ours.
I think it’s more beneficial to allow the full customization than to remove it. More people get their needs met.
Has anybody expressed ANY like of having the menus side scrolling across the top? There is their clue on how to move “forward”. I appreciate you are trying to help them, but I don’t think they want help. I’m a lifetime Pass member and my way moving forward is likely moving out. At least 3 other options I will be installing and testing.
I really wish Plex would go the way of giving us a more generic blueprint/template to how we want to show our content, along with a ton of personalization. You want a filtered library on the left-side, go for it! You want to display movies in a horizontal list (instead of vertical), go right ahead. Yeah it would probably be a bit more of a headache to implement, but think of how custom you could make/present your data.
I think where it gets hard for Plex is the intermingling of server hosted content vs. Plex hosted content - maybe they should’ve just released 2 separate apps instead.
Not being someone interesting in the adult media, I have no experience, but I see what you are getting at. Interesting. Again, with my no experience, it seems a separate Plex server would be best, but I’m not saying this as someone who knows best.
Hmm, but I assume they fit the TV Show episode format. No?
Yes, but they are still music focused. Plex, inc. thinks of things in terms of Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos. They aren’t wrong to do so. It’s a format thing. The thing here is combining Movies with Music. Plex needs to deal with it.
Yes, Plex needs to come up with something better for displaying/focusing on Collections. Collections is such a key to customizing Plex, yet Plex doesn’t allow admins to enough control over focusing on them. I do love the new-ish hubs for bringing specific Collections to the Home screen, but there needs to be more. I honestly believe Collection have a greater ability to customize Plex than Libraries ever did.
BTW, I have over 400 Christmas movies in my TMDB list alone. Then there is Easter and 4th of July, etc.
Oh this is so good! Okay, I’m going to challenge Plex.
Database-wise, these are genres. The problem is that Plex isn’t giving us enough options to filter/present based on genres/collections. This is my main complaint. Collections are the proper place for this type of organization, but we NEED greater options/flexibility to customize the display of these Collections.
For example: I have multiple Collections devoted to Walt Disney Studios. Pixar, Marvel, Disney, Touchstone, Full-length movies, Shorts, Avengers, Guardians, Spider-man, okay you get the point (think I hit enought of them). But, they get lost in the over 300+ collections I have. I’m not going to start creating Libraries for all of those, nor the other 300 collections. So, being constructive (without a current answer), what is the solution?
This isn’t a Library in Plex’s thinking. I’ve never seen them giving libraries this type of thought. Plex, inc. is looking at it quite strictly from a database structure. Thus, genres are the relationship table they are thinking about (oh, please don’t tell me genres is just a table field).
Dang, I love this. This is true UI design. Plex, inc. are you listening?!!!
I think the big key is offering users the things they want to see in the order they want to see them in the most upfront facing menu possible… on the left.
Well the number one biggest issue I have is that I have three different Plex Servers. When you click on Libraries across the top it shows all of the libraries but instead of the actual Server Friendly Name under it it is showing the account name. In the old version it broke these down by Friendly Name. It’s impossible to tell which server I’m looking at now.
My issue with intermingling some content and depending on labels for restrcitions is that there have been a few times now where an update resulted in Plex ignoring restrictions and displaying content with restricted labels to users it shouldn’t.
Granted, I understand that using labels, tags and genres in THEORY is the best way to do it, but in practice, many people have trust issues in Plex, and do something to minimize potential disasters.
I was thinking more about this today… if we’re looking for more use cases. There are likely others out there that have personal libraries of unlisted content. Home movies and such. You can’t assign a genre to those. So far as I know, the only way you can categorize them is to split them into their own libraries… and again… who’s to prescribe a “best practice” to that?
I think “best practice” as especially applies to Plex and custom content, is in the eye of the user, not the provider.
