If you prune files you’ve watched the Multiple Cuts is completely irrelevant to you. Multiple Cuts of a Movie are very much a long-term thing. If you delete it after you’ve watched it then you are only ever going to have a single version.
But for those of us who have our DVD collection on Plex because those are the movies that we buy & not rent because they are going to be watched multiple times, having an option of watching the Theatrical version or Extended version of The Ring Lord, or the British version or American version of The Hairy Potter, or the Original or Remastered version of Near Encounters of the 4th Kind, or if people want to choose if they watch the Solo Hun shoot 1st or not when watching The War of the Stars, or even for home movies if you had Dad’s recording of Easter 2015 & also had Aunt Susan’s recording of the same event you could have one entry for them but with 2 different play options. So for those who would use this feature it’s anything BUT fleeting information.
& showing the “filename in the drop down menu” is just a crude & ugly way of doing it. If that’s what we get fine, we’ll use it, but it’s far from the best way. & I made this mockup because the .plexmatch is a new thing that I feel us highly under utilized but has the potential to be used for a lot of things with the structure of the file.
As of now you use “hints” as they call them to help Plex match things that are not named well.
I had an issue awhile back with a show that was titled “3x3 Eyes” & after an update Plex decided that the files, even though they were properly named according to the Plex Naming Conventions, “3x3 Eyes S01E01.mp4”, “3x3 Eyes S01E02.mp4”, “3x3 Eyes S01E03.mp4”, “3x3 Eyes S01E04.mp4”, & “3x3 Eyes S02E01.mp4”, “3x3 Eyes S02E02.mp4”, “3x3 Eyes S02E03.mp4” were all different versions of Season 3 Episode 3. So for things like that I get it.
But you can only use the .plexmatch file, as of now, to say “Match to this TVdb ID or IMdb ID or TMdb ID”, or say “Match to this title & release year”, or say “for this file match it to this episode of the show”.
So there’s lots of room to grow. I have another feature suggestion for giving us the abilities to match an episode to a different episode than what it’s named as. There are lots of cases where this is useful, again for those of us who keep stuff on our servers not the single-use crowd.
Like shows that have different episode numberings on TVdb than on the DVDs some are getting them from, & TVdb has a DVD order, but sometimes those are not what we, as users, have or want. Some shows have alternate orders but Plex only lets you use Airing, DVD, or Absolute. That doesn’t work for everything.
The basics of the .plexmatch are very simple.
- Identify what is being hinted
- give a hint
- tell where that hint goes
All separated with a :
so cut: would be saying that this hint is telling Plex that this line is going to be telling it how to sort that then WHATEVER NAME: is telling it that that is what “Cut” this line is dealing with then the last, for this case would have to be the file name. For TV shows there are other options, like using a .plexmatch file to name a folder as a season & everything in that folder will override any season numbering on the files.
This .plexmatch tool only came out in March, so it’s brand new, meaning they are most likely still working to improve it. This feature suggestion has been around for 10 years & has over 1500 votes, that tells me that the problem is most likely a “How To” so, even though I think better ones have been suggested already, there must be some reason those haven’t made the cut, since this is new, it’s development is still fresh & probably still being worked on, I’d rather an inelegant solution than no solution at all.
The problem with that is that if transcoding is off then you CAN’T do anything except play the original quality. But from my experience even then it won’t play the lower quality version.
I had a movie at 1080p with a bitrate of 6 or 8 Mbps, not excessively high by any means, but I also had a version at 720p that was just over 1Mbps & a 480p version that was about 700kbps. I had bad upload speeds that capped out at 2Mbps on a good day where I was at so I had remote streaming limited to 1.5Mbps which Plex has as 1.5Mbps (480p).
The 720p file was AVC (H.264) High V3.0 with AAC Stereo audio, so everything can play it, the 480 was similar with a lower profile.
But when streaming from away it would play the 1080p file transcoded down to 480 using more bandwidth than if it had played the 720 or the 480 file that was already there.
When I disabled Video Stream transcoding it just told me that I couldn’t watch it. But even if that worked it would mean that the other things that I might want it to transcoded when needed wouldn’t.
