jreinhound - Unfortunately I can’t answer that. I’ve only been using it for a few months and haven’t taken the time to look at features I don’t currently use. emby.media is the address and they’ve got a wealth of information to read if you’re interested in trying them out.
The fix for this could be much simpler. We don’t really need new file-naming translation logic. We just need PMS to:
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Show the actual file names when choosing a version. The current display of file encoding info is largely useless in this context.
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Store separate viewing progress for files that are different time lengths, but keep it combined if they are the same length. This gives us the best of both worlds.
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Precisely. As drume said. Nothing more, nothing less.
Why is this so difficult? I have tested this in my Shield and it simply wants to play a version that it has decided on of a movie that has both a 1080 and 4k version. I do not want it to decide for me and there is no apparent way to alter the decision (with the Shield). I can get there in IOS, but it is relatively painful as well. This should not be a very difficult change to make. It is very disappointing that this has not been accommodated after 6 years!!! This would also fix my directors cut vs theatrical cut (as listed in this thread). Crazy!
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Someone should post a bug report, there is clearly a serious bug in the development team.
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I am really surprise that Plex cannot deal with this. It would be great to have the way to see the different versions from the same movie in the same place. I am wondering why it is not given that option to the user? Just adding the text information “Play Version” will be a good start.
This is the most serious problem I have with Plex.
When clicking on a movie I would love to see a nice and proper list of all the different versions I have of that movie included front and center on the movie page (well, at least above the Cast, anyway). And ultimately, for me, that should be the long-term goal.
But sure, just having the filenames included in the current “Play Version…” function would make a huge difference, with a minimum of effort.
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It’s probably been mentioned before several times on this thread, but I wanted to combine a few of the workarounds I’ve seen into a single recent comment for people visiting this multi-year thread. I echo the dissatisfaction that there isn’t an existing feature to make version selections easier.
In this example, I’ll be using Star Wars 1977 (720p) and Star Wars Special Edition 1997 (1080p). I manually rename the movie to “Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope” instead of the official “Star Wars”.
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Split and Rename (Multiple movie titles)
- Save the movie files with different names. Plex may combine them as the same movie file and you should split and rename accordingly. Use Fix Match if the special edition fails the movie lookup due to the year. Alternatively, use the year 1977 in the file name to get Special Edition to match, then you can split.
- Pros:
- Easy to implement and maintain
- All versions show up in library search
- Cons:
- Separate movie titles with no relationship maintained between different versions
- Watch progress counts for both titles (you can unmatch the alternate versions to remedy this and manually update the metadata)
- Pros:
- Folder Structure:
- /Movies/Star Wars (1977).mp4
- /Movies/Star Wars (1997) [Special Edition].mp4 or Star Wars (1977) [Special Edition].mp4
- Plex naming:
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope [Special Edition]
- Save the movie files with different names. Plex may combine them as the same movie file and you should split and rename accordingly. Use Fix Match if the special edition fails the movie lookup due to the year. Alternatively, use the year 1977 in the file name to get Special Edition to match, then you can split.
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Extras (Single movie title; Hidden)
- Save the alternate versions as a movie extra. You will need to navigate to the movie and select Extras in order to view the other versions. Drawback is that it’s not always obvious to look in the Extras folder for alternate versions, especially if you already have movie Extras.
- Pros:
- Single title shown in library
- Relationship between versions exists in file system
- Cons:
- Easy for users to miss that an alternate edition exists
- Clutters existing Extras for movies
- Extras do not have external subtitle support
- Pros:
- Folder Structure:
- /Movies/Star Wars (1977)/Star Wars (1977).mp4
- /Movies/Star Wars (1977)/Other/Special Edition (1997).mp4
- Plex naming:
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope / Extras / Special Edition (1997)
- Save the alternate versions as a movie extra. You will need to navigate to the movie and select Extras in order to view the other versions. Drawback is that it’s not always obvious to look in the Extras folder for alternate versions, especially if you already have movie Extras.
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Collections (Single movie title)
- Save the movie files with different names. Split the plex entry for the movie if necessary. Tag related movies in the same collection (Get Info > Tags > Collections), using the official title as the collection. You should then modify your library settings to collapse collections into a single title in your library (Edit Library > Advanced > Collections > Hide items which are in collections). Note that this method will change the behavior of browsing your library if you already use collections properly so that you will now see your existing collection plus all of the movie version collections, which isn’t great. Adding the movie versions to the existing collection will result in a similar browsing experience as the Split and Rename method.
- Pros:
- Single title shown in library
- Cons:
- Cannot include your movie version collections in an existing collection (ex. “Star Wars (1977)” collection cannot be added to “Star Wars” collection), resulting in a maclunky library browsing experience
- Relies on Plex library metadata for version relationship (moving files to new server will lose the Collections relationship unless metadata restored)
- Pros:
- Folder Structure:
- /Movies/Star Wars (1977).mp4
- /Movies/Star Wars (1997) [Special Edition].mp4
- Plex naming:
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope > Collection “Star Wars (1977)”
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope [Special Edition] > Collection “Star Wars (1977)”
- Save the movie files with different names. Split the plex entry for the movie if necessary. Tag related movies in the same collection (Get Info > Tags > Collections), using the official title as the collection. You should then modify your library settings to collapse collections into a single title in your library (Edit Library > Advanced > Collections > Hide items which are in collections). Note that this method will change the behavior of browsing your library if you already use collections properly so that you will now see your existing collection plus all of the movie version collections, which isn’t great. Adding the movie versions to the existing collection will result in a similar browsing experience as the Split and Rename method.
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Multiple Resolutions Feature (Single movie title; Hidden and obfuscated)
- You can hijack the Multiple Resolutions feature to collapse your versions into a single title and then choose the version you want in the resolution selector. This is not a very good fix and I don’t know what the behavior would be if you have multiple files with the same resolution. You will also not see your custom title in the resolution picker, just the resolution. If you still want to do this, save the movie files with the same name plus the extra information after a dash. Do not split the movies once in Plex.
- Pros:
- Single title shown in library
- Cons:
- Versions with same resolution may be collapsed in the resolution selector; otherwise, they’ll be indistinguishable
- Extra information in file name is not possible to view
- No way to track watch progress on different versions
- Pros:
- Folder Structure:
- /Movies/Star Wars (1977).mp4
- /Movies/Star Wars (1977) - Special Edition.mp4
- Plex naming:
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope > Resolution 720p
- Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope > Resolution 1080p
- You can hijack the Multiple Resolutions feature to collapse your versions into a single title and then choose the version you want in the resolution selector. This is not a very good fix and I don’t know what the behavior would be if you have multiple files with the same resolution. You will also not see your custom title in the resolution picker, just the resolution. If you still want to do this, save the movie files with the same name plus the extra information after a dash. Do not split the movies once in Plex.
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So this thread was started back in 2012 and it has still not been dealt with by Plex. This would assume that they don’t plan to do anything to help facilitate multiple versions of the same movie. Rather disappointing as it could be a simple expansion of the multiple version feature that already exists to accommodate the different versions around.
Please Plex, do something about this!
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All Plex Inc. employees died of boredom from constantly redesigning the client UI.
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Ironically, the problem is caused by over-programming. Just show the actual file name instead of the bit rate. Problem solved!
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I guess my question is, what is the point of the forums and feature requests if Plex is just going to ignore them. This thread has been alive for several years, and nothing from Plex. This is a very requested feature any yet nothing but silence. Very aggravating
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So after reading through all this the answer is still pretty much no right?
I’m going to assume that implementing an elegant solution for this is not as simple as most users think. AFAIK, the available metadata providers do not recognise alternate editions of movies; for example on TMDB Fellowship of the Ring is only listed as the theatrical release (with a runtime of 2h58m) when there’s a well known extended edition (3h28). That means any form of alternate edition tagging would have to be inputted manually which is not really what Plex is about.
Any of the other solutions I see suggested in this thread are crude workarounds. I suppose they could change the version selection drop-down to display the filename rather than bitrate/resolution, but that won’t solve issues like watch progress conflicts and whatnot.
I get it though. The way the software was designed is making us extremely picky about how we want to organise our media. Unfortunately the external services it relies on aren’t ready for granularity of that scale yet.
Erm… Plex allows for user-controlled labels, allows editing of automatically grabbed metadata.
Stating that multiple cuts of a movie is nothing that Plex is about is like saying any of the other features mentioned above are nothing that Plex is about. I am not agreeing.
Plex cannot grab “cut” information automatically?
Here’s what Plex knows without grabbing any information:
a) number of files identified to be the same movie
b) length of video files being the same or being different (different lengths usually are an indication of those files not being classic duplicates)
c) general “length” of the regular movie (on IMDB, for example):
d) file and folder names
Starting on this kind of information, Plex could offer a Plex View that has all movies that “Plex thinks” could be a special cut and let the user choose for these…
Thinking along that avenue, run times and user choices could lead to a new Plex internal database with “cut info” (based on languages).
And if the use is in control to mark files as “… cut”, everything will be good.
Oh, and this source has info on cuts - not suggesting that Plex should scrape these, but it can be done and there are sources available on the net that provide such info:
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But it doesn’t do any processing based on the modified metadata so that’s irrelevant.
No, it’s not. Not remotely.
Plex cannot grab “cut” information automatically?
Here’s what Plex knows without grabbing any information:
a) number of files identified to be the same movie
b) length of video files being the same or being different (different lengths usually are an indication of those files not being classic duplicates)
c) general “length” of the regular movie (on IMDB, for example):
d) file and folder names
Your reading comprehension is frankly terrible if this is your takeaway from my post. I never said Plex can’t parse “cut” information from filename or mediainfo, I’m saying it wouldn’t have any use for it. There’s no metadata available that would distinguish between different cuts, since the agents used by Plex don’t provide them.
Most other Media Managers allow for multiple cuts of movies,
Some tag the file with a descriptor tag (-director) etc…
One I know uses the tag option as above but it’s not defined… It looks for the same file name and if the ending has a dash (-) and text it uses that as a tag. ie -director…
This way you can define your own tags since the tag is used as a descriptor and they have fields that you can use to add additional information about this cut.
So you bring up the movie and you have a list of tags you could scroll through that list (if there is more then one) and it brings up the additional information.
Like; description, run time, re-release date, unrated, added scenes.
Just dreaming here…
Who cares if Plex is auto-filling the “Cut” metadata… it’s not filling any Labels either and labels do exist.
Where’s your argument heading? Nowhere.
Plex is not having any use of it??? Don’t think “problem”… try thinking “solution” for a while.
Agreed. I have text in brackets for my other cuts (like [4k-extended]) and they all showed up automatically as a different version in Emby. This is so simple to implement. Wish the devs would just make the change already.
The runtime of a movie is pulled from the local file, so that wouldn’t be an issue.
I think the biggest issue with metadata would be the movie’s rating (PG-13, R, etc). Those can change with various cuts and it always pulled from the internet.
The other thing might be the naming of each cut, since studios like to get creative with Special Edition, Extended Edition, Directors Cut, Extended Cut, Final Cut, Ultimate Edition, 20th Anniversary, etc. Plex could either have a few of the most common names and use -extended naming like they do for TV extra features or they could actually pull a custom string of text out of the file name using extended or some other bracket system around the important text.
I’d settle for having the wrong rating on the extra cuts. Everything else should be doable locally within Plex Media Server.
One thing I would like though is if they could display all the cuts of a movie on the movie’s home page (at least in the web interface) for easy visibility rather than in a secondary version picker.
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