I haven’t tested this idea yet, as I need to re-rip some movies to attempt it, but I wanted to run this past people here for a sanity check before I try this convoluted mess even once.
Given Plex’s new support for editions, which is awesome for things like director’s cuts or extended editions, and Plex’s existing (but hesitantly endorsed) support for multipart files, I think I might have a way to allow Plex to detect and play multiple editions of movies without taking up double the space that would normally be required to store both a theatrical edition and extended/directors editions.
When we look at ripping Blu-rays/DVDs that contain both editions of a movie, the disc doesn’t contain full copies of both, it uses a series of playlists to go through the files on the disc to create content requested by the ripping program. Meaning if you ask for the theatrical edition, it grabs files 001 through 300 on the disc, while skipping random chunks in the middle. If you ask for the extended edition, it grabs the same set of files, plus the additional scenes in the middle.
My theory is this (with a couple pitfalls that I will mention after):
If I take a movie that has these separate playlists, and make a folder that contains just the parts of the movie that are the same between the two editions, and call that folder “Movie”, it would contain just the theatrical cut of the movie, with the files inside organized per Plex’s multi-part naming sequence, e.g. “Movie pt1.mkv” “Movie pt2.mkv” … “Movie pt5.mkv”. If I then had another folder named “Movie {edition-Extended}”, containing similar named files, I could have the files that are the same be hardlinks to the same pieces of the movie, and therefore not take up additional space. The only difference in actual disk size would be the extra scenes that are not in the theatrical cut of the movie.
Caveats & Pitfalls:
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So the hardlinks would need to be created on the storage host, and the folders have to be on the same volume, partition, etc. Basically all the requirements of hardlinks. I have verified that Plex has no problem playing movies that are hardlinked in this manner, which makes sense.
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I haven’t looked at ripping software (MakeMKV for example) yet to see how granular I can rip pieces of the movie from. I know it does show me the playlist of files it uses, but I will have to see what the controls for actually converting the specific groups of files are.
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Lastly and the biggest stumbling block in this is Plex is officially limited to multiple part files of no more than 8 files. I have not tested the limits of this support, or whether or not this is a hard limit and it won’t play, or if they just won’t like me very much for doing it.
This may just be the ramblings of staying up late and thinking about an idea, so I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask, or if none of this makes sense, or if there’s an obvious solution right in front of me and I just created a Rube Goldberg solution for my own entertainment.
