I searched the Forum but did not find an entry that matched (maybe my search skills are not so strong).
I am ripping my entire DVD Library and found movies that I bought more than once however I also found movies that were Special Editions/Extended Editions/Director Cuts. What is the best practice for naming and matching with the various Movie Database.
They currently are treated as Duplicates in the Plex Schema - perhaps that is the correct thing but I do not see how to choose the version I wish to play. How are duplicates managed and how are separate versions of the same move managed?
Plex currently doesn’t support different editions/cuts of the same movie. Plex will treat those as different quality-versions of the same video. Your best shot (as-of-today) is to manually split the movies … you can then assign separate posters and some suffix to the name to distinguish the versions. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018248-merge-or-split-items/
Alternatively you can move those alternate versions / edition in a separate library.
There’s a long-running feature suggestion to add support for different editions/cuts to the Plex library management.
Thank you for the recommendation - I will consider it.
Is there a way to choose which version in the Duplicate is played through the App or is that there for the user to remove duplicates? I suppose I am wonder what the true purpose of Duplicates is!
There’s a Play version action if a movie has multiple files linked to it. The dialog will however only show a small set of information – mostly about the video quality (resolution and bitrate).
There’s also a feature suggestion to expand that… but currently it won’t be sufficient to pick between different editions/cuts (unless your users check out the technical details of each file beforehand).
where is that action or how is it initiated?
I used the Duplicate Filter feature often while ripping movies. I usually remove the “smaller” version.
perhaps this is better in a different thread, but I am also creating Collections and I envisioned an Extendeded Edition collection for the movies. I suppose I will have to Split the Duplicates but how do I Match so it avoids recreating the Duplicate? Am I making any sense?
Splitting a movie will not unmatched the resulting items. They’re still associated to the same movie – except you’re now able to assign a different poster or to add the version name in the movie titles
Splitting is the way to go… I will start doing that and add new titles to the Collections I am making.
I ran into an issue - One of the entries show two files but does not allow them to be split - they appear to somehow be concatenated.
This movie is using so called “stacked files”. The naming is a bit off from the official naming schema though.
Stacked files will play sequentially. You can use that if your movies come in multiple parts – e.g. the Lord of the Rings movies that were delivered on 2 discs.
See “Movies Split Across Multiple Files” in the support article on naming and organizing your movie media files.
Personally I prefer to actually append (merge) those files as not all Plex players can deal with stacked files. This can e.g. be done quite easily using MKVToolNix (even for non-MKV input files)
With stacked files it’s all about your file names.
You should be able to achieve this by dropping the “PT 1” and “PT 2” from those file names. That being said… do you really want Plex to show them as individual half-movies?
I am unsure how they broke the movie files up from D1 to D2 - does the movie intro begin and I have to carve that out to create the single file?
I created a collection for LOTR - the Extended Edition and another for the Theatrical release. Looks fine on my PC Plex App but the Tivo and Vizio Plex apps do not offer up the Collections OR do not show all the collections I created… is there some mojo I need to do to make all the collection follow the movie Library?
I have created my version of the Lord of the Rings Special Extended Edition movies from the DVD boxes. There the main movie is split across discs 1-2. I’ve ripped them using MakeMKV and there were no additional intros on the 2nd disc. The videos perfectly fit together.
the movies files are stored on my Synology NAS. Did you run the MakeMKV on the NAS or your connected client?
once you create the merged file - did you delete the two copies?
MakeMKV is no server software… you’ll need to run that on a regular computer (not your NAS or a Plex client).
Once you’ve merged those 2 files you can replace the original files. Personally I’d check the new file out before deleting the originals – you can e.g. use VLC to just play the file… in particular have a look at the “stitching” to verify there’s no interruption.
