When adding local extras to our movies, there are particular folders that can be created to add those to (see “Organized in Subdirectories” at https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/)
The problem that I think can be very easily fixed is that these particular categories do not always fit. For example, you may have “Outtakes” and they are not, necessarily, “Behind the Scenes” or “Deleted Scenes”, etc. Or you may have music videos that come on the disc (a lot of the Marvel movies have those), etc. You could use the “Other” folder, but it just titles them all as “Undefined”.
Here is an example of a folder structure and the subsequent way Plex categorizes the video file.
My suggestion is to have Plex use whatever subdirectory folder name I give it, as the category. If I name it “Music Videos”, then name those extras with that categorization. If I name it Outtakes, so be it. If I name the folder, “My Favorite Parts”, that is what I would get.
Doing this would not only give us some options but would not break anyone’s configuration since theirs is already in the other folders and they would stay the same.
Note: I do know that you can just name the files with a " - " and the category name (if it is one of the ones shown) and those would have to stay the same, I believe, but those using subdirectory folders would be benefited from what should be a fairly easy change.
This is kind of the idea but if you make everything use “Extras”, you could have a lot in one big bucket.
The way I did it, the person that wants to have everything as “Extras” can but someone that wants to put them in specialized groups would get that as well.
Also, moving to all “Extras” breaks currently created folders.
This is an excellent idea! There are so many more names for extra content that I can think of that the current naming structure currently does not handle. Movies have “Easter Eggs”, “Making Of”, “Short Films”, all the others listed above and other bonus features that could all be placed in a very simple and logical folder name and displayed exactly how it is configured by the user.
I have noticed that PLEX continues to dig into sub-folders of the main movie folder and looks for additional “main movie” content. I not sure why it would be necessary to do that though. I had a typo in “Behind The Scenes” folder and PLEX picked up an extra 10 movies trying to match them all. Once a main movie folder is identified by PLEX, I think the scan should stop there and all sub-folders under the main movie folder should be considered extras., right? If that is not the way PLEX looks at it though then maybe adding an “extras” subfolder under the main movie can contain all the additional folder names of the extra content as being suggested here.
You can organize your local extras into specific subdirectories inside the main directory named for the movie. Extras will be detected and used if named and stored as follows:
Yes, my bad, “shorts” is already supported, my point is though if you look at the back of the movie cover there are many ways that the bonus, extra features are named and the suggestion above would give us all the ability to name each extra feature exactly as the author named them with no limits.
I have literally been asking for this for years now.
My take on the feedback i’ve gotten so far is that Plex employees consider this a feature that already exists as we can simply name our media differently to fit their code rather than them changing the code to allow for flexibility in naming convention.
I would love to see this being implemented but i doubt it will get much traction among the programmers.
