Not sure if you ignored or skimmed over my last message in this thread, but the existing tagging system is flexible enough to accommodate any type of cut…
Super Duper Extended Edition-cut.mkv
That’s how the current tags work, you type the name for the extra and tag it with the type of extra, it’s not that difficult. “cut” would simply be the only extra tag they would need to add.
Nope, I didn’t ignore or skim.
So using your idea and expanding on it, lets say I have a movie with a file name such as…
Deadpool.4.2023.1080p.TrueHD-Atmos_7.1.BluRay.10Bit.x265.Super.Duper.Extended.Edition-cut.mkv
How is Plex going to pull out the cut name from that? How much of the file name will Plex use to determine the cut name that you want?
Or are you suggesting that Plex used the entire filename before the -cut, because if you are, then there will be a significant number of people who wouldn’t be happy with that.
Please don’t get me wrong… I’m not trying to be argumentative, or dismissive in regards to your ideas, however when you start to really think it through, you may start to find problems with an idea.
So with that in mind, if you are going to make the suggestion that Plex simply adds a new tag of -cut, then please give me an example filename that you think will work, based on the example I gave above.
Wouldn’t that be a filename that goes against the recommended filename? (
https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/)
I thought he meant something like this:
/Movies
/Avatar (2009)
Avatar (2009).mkv
Bar Fight-deleted.mp4
Super Duper Extended Edition-cut.mkv
This way you would end up with a the Avatar Movie, the deleted bar fight extra scene and also the super duper extended cut version.
You could also organize it in an subdirectory like this:
/Movies
/Avatar (2009)
Avatar (2009).mkv
/Deleted Scenes
Bar Fight.mp4
/Cuts
Super Duper Extended Edition-cut.mkv
I actually would prefer a solution where I could organize my additional cuts together with my extras and subtitles. So more something like this:
/Movies
/Avatar (2009)
/Final Cut
Avatar (2009).mkv
Bar Fight-deleted.mp4
/Super Duper Extended Edition
Avatar (2009).mkv
This way my movie files with every additional files I might have would me much more organized.
Not really no.
To be more specific, I have the following.
D:\Plex\Movies - This is where my library points to.
Then under there, I have a sub-folder for each movie, and more importantly, I include the date in brackets, in the folder name, so I then get…
Deadpool 4 (2020)\Deadpool.4.2023.1080p.TrueHD-Atmos_7.1.BluRay.10Bit.x265.Super.Duper.Extended.Edition-cut.mkv
The naming convention does indeed take note of the use of brackets, either in the folder name or in the file name…
As well as the use of braces…
I certainly wouldn’t be happy with this, and neither would many users, as we tend to want to have additional details about the movie in relation to their technical content, within the file name, such as DTS-HD-MA_7.1 or TrueHD_Atmos_7.1 or whatever…
However this would be better, but still not perfect…
That is one of the reasons I suggested about three years ago that perhaps the best solution might be to use sub folders with -cut tacked on to the end of the folder name. Any movie inside which doesn’t have a known extras flag would be seen as a version of that cut. So, anytime Plex sees a Super Duper -cut folder it could strip of the -cut ending and use whatever was left as the custom name.
They might could even put a check box in the movie’s settings that says this movie includes multiple cuts to tell Plex to run it’s special -cut search and load up the special cut interface.
@Ridley - Scrolling back through the early posts, I see you +1’d this WAAYYY back in March 2013…
Seeing as how you are still working for @Plex 8 years later, and have recently been part of the Plex Pro week, surely it’s about time you chimed back in on this??
I guess not! … How frustrating!
@elan Since I see you giving to other topics and starting to explain whats going on behind the scenes maybe I can get an answer here as well? 
I don’t expect you to make a final answer but are you having any plans at all of implementing multiple cuts of a movie somehow in the mid-term future?
It’s honestly a tough one. We would need metadata support in the cloud for this so different editions get different UUIDs, as well as a relationship to canonical item (like we have for music albums, e.g.)
Huh? That doesn’t make any sense. All the metadata that’s needed is in our files. Go with the simple solution so we can have something for multiple versions. We don’t want to wait 8 more years for a perfect solution.
Can you elaborate this a little more? I don’t understand where the need is coming from to differentiate on an UUID level? Wouldn’t it be the same movie with the same ID? We could reuse the metadata that are already existent and just use a sort of tagging mechanism to differentiate the movies?
View progress, view count, all that stuff is tied to a UUID.
Hi @elan - Firstly, many thanks for responding to this thread.
Quite a few people have been getting a little frustrated due to the sheer number of votes cast, and the length of time it’s been running, so I have no doubt everyone will really appreciate this.
In regards to the UUID comment, I will admit that I am no developer and certainly don’t claim to understand how the backed works, but if you were to [or get someone to] take a glance over some of the many suggestions made in this thread over the years, there have been quite a few good ideas.
And I wonder if it might actually be possible to start relatively simple, and then build on it over time.
Even if you completely ignore the progress and view count in the early days, and initially consider the items behavior as the same as if you were to use the “split” function.
Anyways, I think you might find that this topic certainly warrants some consideration from you guys 
Okay thank you very much for going into details. That makes sense now. And I’m with axemanuk666 here. I really appreciate you taking your time and answering some of our questions.
There’s what appears to be a relevant discussion over at Extended editions - Talk — The Movie Database (TMDB) which links to a feature request folks might like to vote for at Trello.
I’ve given it a little more thought. How about the existing splitting mechanism, would that be a possible direction to go with?
Let me explain: I assume if you manually split the movie we get a different UUID for each movie. If I separate multiple cuts of an movie like the already suggested tagging mechanism Plex could do the splitting for me automatically. But now we have multiple library items which we dont’t want. Since Plex knows that the splitting happened automatically it could take care for us of hiding the moves and group them together for us in the UI.
This is starting to look like a collection. Three different versions of a single film (think Close Encounters) grouped as a small collection. You would need the ability to hide individual films that are in a collection instead of all films that are in collections.
I don’t think that is the case. If you play a split movie, the other movies that are part of that split will show the same progress.
I agree with others that we can easily live with multiple cuts using a single source of Metadata from the internet. Perhaps what you need to do is take the UUID and add a .1 or .2 or .3 to each cut for tracking the progress and view count of individual cuts.
Put a checkbox in the settings that specifically turns on this feature for a movie with multiple cuts and triggers the more advanced handling of it.
Perhaps alternatively allow users to put a multicut.data metadata file in the movie folder to trigger the multi-cut feature for that movie and also tell Plex what it needs to know about the different files.
So then @elan’s explanation has no merit. If it’s the same result with a split as it would be to show it in a drop down list with multiple versions, then why not just add the drop down list so we can see multiple versions vs multiple movies?
The explanation that “this is hard” is simply a weak argument. @elan , your devs can do this. It’s as simple as displaying the movies differently than you do now. Again … The simple solution is better than the perfect solution.
