Imagine if you could assign a few videos to a collection, and then give that collection a custom background image, poster, and text?
Let's say I've got 4 Kate Winslet movies. So I add them all to a collection called 'Kate Winslet'.
Then I edit that collection, with a background, a poster, and some text I copied from Wikipedia.
Then Plex/Web might let me view it something like this...
Is this something the Plex team might consider for the future?
I guess the main point is, collections have a lot of potential uses. And creating a new section every time you want to achieve something like this, makes the home screen too cluttered.
I have a section called “Home Movies”. Within that section, I might assign clips to collections like “Christmas 2005” or “Honeymoon”.
It would be great if I could style those collections so that they have nicely themed intro pages, using photos of family etc.
I collect music videos. I have a section called “Music Videos”, and I name each video file “artist - songtitle”. I use “Plex Movie Scanner” as the scanner, and “Personal Media” as the agent - just to prevent Plex from changing the names of the videos. Each music video clip is assigned to a collection of artist name, e.g. “Madonna”.
So naturally, it would fun if I could create a nice intro page for the Madonna ‘collection’, rather than just showing a plain list of clips.
The idea is great and I’ll up-vote it. However, for the example given (all movies with Kate Winslet), I’d rather have Plex handle this by itself. Plex already knows about all the movies that star Kate Winslet and allows us to filter for them. So in my opinion Plex should gather actor pictures and details on its own and then allow us to modify it (like modifying movie metadata).
Yes, agreed. It would be nice if metadata could be grabbed in instances where the collection is an actor name, or singer's name.
I guess it would need to be an optional function - a button to "find a match" based on collection title.
And if your collection is just something personal like 'Holiday in the Bahamas' or something, then you wouldn't click the button.
But it might be easier to just add another MedataData Field for User Names and another for Movie-Collection, then a user can put the names of the Users in the house that like each movie and use the search feature to search for the movies that his daughter likes. This would save the need for putting files in different directories and should be easier to implement.
But basically, I would settle just for a really simple implementation of this, ie. the ability to edit a collection, and give it:
- a title
- a main pic
- a background pic
- text
The presence of 1 or more of these values would trigger the "special layout" in any clients capable of showing it (i.e. the example pic at top of this thread)
Any automatic downloading of metadata for certain collections (e.g. movie trilogies) could come later.
Elan liked and commented on the thread, so it looks like the Plex team is aware of our interest in updates to collections (they probably just can't get to every thread on the topic). Now that they've made some major updates to music, perhaps they'll have some time to spend on this.
or Spiderman :blink: …