Please, please, please, please, please: just make Plex self-consistent
If editions are a feature, make it a feature everywhere (all library types)[mod-edit: duplicate → see below]
If local extras are a feature, make it compatible with other features, like editions[mod-edit: duplicate → see below]
If external extras are a feature, make sure they actually route and playback before presenting them as playable options (maybe 1 out of 50 ever plays)
If extras are available, don’t only offer them on “apps” and “on the website, but only for movies”: make them available and consistent on all platforms and all library types[mod-edit: duplicate → see below]
If .plexmatch is a feature, let it work everywhere (all library types). (e.g., if IMDB and TVDB are referable sources for video, then Musicbrainz should be supported for audio)[mod-edit: duplicate → see below]
If “prefer local files” or “prefer local metadata” is an option, and it is checked, then actually respect it. Ideally, at least for music libraries, there should be an “only use local metadata” option so we can just eliminate all the Musicbrainz mismatching shenanigans. Plexamp is only as good as the database it reads from…[mod-edit: implemented → see below]
If versions are a feature, make it a feature everywhere (all library types). Also, make versions easily identifiable, separate, and filterable. (e.g., high-res vs low-res, stereo-vs-surround, etc.} in all interfaces, please. Or better yet, support obvious differences without explicit version tags.[mod-edit: duplicate → see below]
If TVDB is the master source of authority on TV series, then implement it fully (e.g., episode cross-referencing between multiple series). If there isn’t an alternative to TVDB, we’re just stuck.[mod-edit: duplicate → see below]
Please follow the guide for feature suggestions and stick with 1 suggestion per thread. Otherwise users will have a hard time to actually vote for your thread (voting for all or nothing).
In your case, it appears almost all of those suggestions are already covered in existing threads. Please comment/vote in those threads in order to help us avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes. The exception seems to be describing a possible bug or issue in your setup for which logs might be helpful (online extras not playing).
That sounds less like a suggestion but a bug report. It might be helpful to get logs from the player app where you experience this behavior for troubleshooting.
I’ve seen a few reports where users had issues playing the online extras due to certain restrictions in their home network.
Local extras are a feature, not only for movies (throwing in the support articles on how to add files as local extras for movies and tv-shows). Handling vor Other video type libraries is the same as for movies.
There are gaps when it comes to displaying local extras on all clients and for all tiers of tv shows (there’s a conclusive list which clients support displaying local extras for what tiers of a show in the support article linked above). There’s a feature suggestion discussing for Plex to support displaying all tiers of tv-shows on all apps (show, season and episode extras).
You should be able to set your library agent to Plex Personal Media to prevent your library from using any online metadata (or assets). If you’re using the Plex Music agent, setting your library to Prefer local metadata should already do that – at least for any file formats where Plex can read the embedded metadata (which should be the case for the common music formats).
For what library types are you missing this option?
As posted above… there’s a separate suggestion asking for an option to support different releases/versions of albums in music libraries. Beyond that, all library types should support different-quality versions of their items. Edit: No tags needed to handle different-quality versions.
TheTVDb is not a master source of authority for TV series within Plex. That being said, Plex is sourcing metadata from different repositories – including TheTVDb. Though for most shows the role of “master source” appears to be TMDb.
There’s an existing suggestion for Plex to support crossover episodes across different shows (if that’s what you mean by cross-referencing).
Thanks for the fast response, Tom. Correct, I do not want to cannibalize existing feature suggestions. However, I would still argue that there is still an overarching theme to my request regarding self-consistency. There are many things that work or don’t work depending on the type of library it is in or depending on the client, which is exacerbated when you see something work or have a workaround in one part of Plex but not in another.
Regarding the external extras not working, I saw that one of the most recent PMS updates had a bugfix specifically for this. I did update but I’m still experiencing difficulties getting them to play. I’m running 1.41.0.8994 on RHEL8 right now. I’ll have to research how to pull logs from the Plex app for the Amazon Firestick, which is where I last noticed the problem.
Regarding the extras not being available uniformly across all clients, the toughest one to cope with is the webpage not presenting extras in series. One would intuitively expect that the website on the machine hosting the database, the PMS service, and the content to actually have the most detailed, reliable, and visible representation of the content, but it doesn’t. Very odd. Whether working on the server or on another machine on the network, the webpage is the first point of testing to make sure something new got added right - it’s easy to forget that you can’t check extras for series that way. The bug where movie extras don’t work when multiple editions of the movie exist adds another dimension to the issue.
Regarding the “prefer local meta data” idea…I will try that. I’ll make a separate music library as a Plex Personal Media library and see how that fares. It won’t solve the problem of distinguishing different versions of the same album but it could potentially eliminate all of the Musicbrainz mismatches.
Regarding the {version-XYZ} feature, I’ve only seen this work in scenarios where we’re talking about a video might be on the server as both an MP4 and an MKV, which isn’t something I come across often.
However, I do come across videos that get remastered. Let’s say I have “SeriesName S1E2 {version-Original}.mkv” and “SeriesName S1E2 {version-Remastered}.mkv”. A Series library won’t display both options like a Movies library will, regardless of the client. If you’re on a web client, you can click the “…” button, choose “Play Version”, and it’ll display a list of the version options, However, it doesn’t display the version names I provided, just some base stats about the videos - not much to go by.
If we’re talking audio libraries, I’ve not seen the {version-XYZ} tag work at all. Maybe that’s because Musicbrainz can theoretically provide a superior distinction.
Regarding TV series cross-referencing, I mean something different. If I’m reading the post you linked to correctly, they’re asking for a way to weave several series and possibly movies into a cohesive watching sequence (either by release date or by the narrative’s own time order). Cool idea. I was looking for something simpler, something to alleviate users from delving into the world of hardlinks and recursive filesystem workarounds: Multi-series episode matching BUG Also, I thought TVDB was the preferred master for TV series and that TMDB was only meant for individual/non-series matching.
Plex Web will display local extras for TV Shows – but not for seasons or episodes.
Local extras work just fine with editions. By design you should keep different editions in their own top-level folder – if you mix multiple editions in the same top-level movie folder, none of them will display local extras.
That’s not how different-quality versions work. It appears you’re trying to apply the handling of editions (different cuts) to versions by appending the file names with some tag. Plex doesn’t have a concept for a {version-...} tag in folder/file names. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200381043-multi-version-movies/
Each episode can have different-quality versions and Plex will recognize those just fine. The Play Version modal will display some key characteristics of the video (bitrate and resolution). There’s a separate suggestion, discussing for Plex to display more information about each version in the Play Version modal.
You seem to be trying to mix editions and versions – that’s not a thing.
See above… there’s no such thing as a {version-XYZ} tag in Plex. Plex currently doesn’t have a concept for different editions/qualities of albums (see duplicate suggestion linked in my previous response).
In that case, this should be the suggestion for you (though it doesn’t seem there’s much interest in this feature at this point).
With the example given in your other thread, you might want to consider using Collections to group episodes or shows without the need to deal with any of those duplications.
Most television extras fall at the episode level, and then after that, the season level. Only the most generic of things fall at the series level. The apps offer them at the lower levels; I just wish the website would.
That approach will cause the same issue reported regarding episodes that belong to multiple series but now for movies: Either just one edition gets the extras or, to have both editions have the extras, one must either copy them to both places (and waste disk space) or apply the hardlink+samba filesystem remount workaround I detailed/discovered in the above link. The latter approach requires shear willpower and significant technical know-how.
Yes, you’re correct. I’m not sure where I came across the {version-} tagging concept. I just searched my library and didn’t find a trace of it, so I’m not tying to employ it. However, there’s still a distinction to be made between editions and functionally different versions of the same thing - and this is one of the consistency problems I face all the time:
Movie libraries support {edition-} tagging, Series and Music libraries do not.
Whereas Movie libraries auto-detect multiple but different instances of the same video, and a way to choose to play each one does technically exist, no such mechanism exists in Music libraries where the feature is most needed (for me, at least).
Musicbrainz tagging can help properly separate originals and remasters, untangle different sources (CD, SACD, Blu-ray, DVD-A, DVD-V, download, etc.) but there isn’t a way to see those distinctions in any of the clients.
Consistently supporting {edition-} tagging in Series and Music libraries the same way Movie libraries do, at least in how options are presented in clients, would be fantastically amazing.
I’ve tried to apply Collections. The use case is for cartoons in a Series library - unfortunately, the behavior of a Collection is no different. Once Plex latches onto the inode of a file, it performs its match and won’t let go - you can’t get it to also-match a file to a different series via Collections because it’s already been catalogued in the database. I suspect Plex’s use of inodes as a primary key (somewhere) is buried so deep in the code, it’s not worth asking Plex to not use inodes. However, adding a column or a table to implement TVDB’s cross-referencing seems reasonable. The consistency factor here is, let’s say you’ve given a file two hardlinks, one for each series the episode belongs to, each time you re-scan the library, the episode ends up in the opposite series. Not fun. Example: All Tom & Jerry episodes are MGM Cartoons, not all MGM Cartoons are Tom & Jerry, and TVDB catalogued all Tom & Jerry episodes in both series. Easy-peasy.
