So my mom was trying to watch Return of the Jedi the other day, and she complained that the version I have is “the one with all the stupid cartoon stuff.” Of course, I know I have both the special edition and the theatrical release, but over the phone I was unable to direct her to the right version. Ultimately I deleted the special edition from my server entirely to avoid confusion in the future, but this presents a problem.
The information provided by the “Play Version” modal is not particularly useful, especially in cases where versions differ in more than just quality. You may want to keep multiple versions available for educational or historical reasons, so deleting alternate versions is not always an option.
For example, in this menu you can chose to play either the theatrical or director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s Alien:
Can you guess which is which? It’s impossible, since resolution and bitrate tell you nothing about what the actual content of the video is.
What you must do is go into the “Media Info” modal, which is only available on the web client, identify the bitrate of the version you’re interested in, then close that panel and return to the Play Version modal.
let’s take a look at this feature request… it goes in a slightly different direction but in the end it’s addressing the same issue (better management of different versions / cuts / editions of a movie).
it’s not an exact match – so I’m not closing this one unless you want to switch over there
Thanks for linking that! I agree this is a very different request. That one is requesting that Plex identify different cuts of the same film, which is something that TMDB (Plex’s metadata source for films) does not generally do. Having worked with TMDB on my own projects I know this would be prohibitively difficult, which is probably why that request has remained unresolved for over six years.
This request only concerns the display of data that Plex already has. Adding a column to the existing menu for filename is a much simpler proposition.
Edit: Just to add, I’ve created a quick mockup of what this could look like:
Simply concatenating the filename to the end of the string would solve all my woes
I would add that if you leveraged the existing Local Trailers and Extras file naming suffix and allow us to customize them, you could put that data into the “Play Version” select Title. I would also drop the Mbps data altogether. The Resolution is nice for separating between different resolution versions.
For my collection, a more meaningful title would be the most useful. I have all of my versioned files named in this kind of way:
10/05/2017 09:43 PM 21,104,194,494 - Blade Runner (1982) - The Director’s Cut.mkv
10/05/2017 08:24 PM 20,476,415,572 - Blade Runner (1982) - The Final Cut Version (2007).mkv
10/05/2017 10:04 PM 21,390,328,938 - Blade Runner (1982) - The International Cut.mkv
10/05/2017 09:54 PM 21,346,001,317 - Blade Runner (1982) - The Theatrical Cut.mkv
10/05/2017 10:58 PM 20,241,507,887 - Blade Runner (1982) - The Workprint.mkv
If I could see that Title that I put between the dash and the file extension, that would be golden.
I like the filename idea too but, depending on on the file name’s length, and formatting, it could get a pretty large box.
I’m quite pleased to see that there are others that feel this is important. Not everyone is OCD about file names on the OS, so I can see where leveraging regexes to ascertain what to “name” a version could be difficult. It’s easy to get carried away with feature requests (not that anyone is but just in case others jump on the bandwagon), so I’d suggest we break it down into phases:
Phase 1 of this request could simply be to add the file name to the “Play Version” modal, just like @xanderstrike mocked up above. This is like 10 minutes of work to code, worst case. This is literally what I envisioned when I was searching for this thread.
Phase 2 could encompass additional capabilities, like custom regexes for savvy users…or some sort of tag-based system.
It is hard to believe that to this day this option has not been added yet. I have no idea who thought bit-rate would be a meaningful differentiator but even just a movie length would be at least a little more helpful. It would be fantastic if it could display “Special Edition”, “Directors Cut”, “Extended Edition”, etc…
The movies in my case usually only have the theatrical and the extended but there are a select number of case were more would be needed. Anything is better then the current setup.
Its something thats been discussed in another thread in the last couple of days.
Emby gives you the option to tag whatever you like to a file name and identifies the file as whatever you put in the tag.
No help I know for Plex users… But it shows it’s not difficult to achieve.
Well we absolutely need that! Just took my Vote from something else to put it here…
Why in the hell is there a dropdown which is called “Video” if you cant use it??
I think we need 4 things to config befor starting a Movie!
1.) Film Edition (which have to be different Video Editions)
2.) Video Source (Same Edition but other Video-Quality Level)
3.) Audio Source (Same Edition but other Audio-Quality Level)
4.) Sub Source (Same Edition but other Subtitles)
Just like this it makes sence.
Examples
1.) Standard Extended Directors Cut Cinema Edition 3D SBS 3D HOU
2.) 2160p HFR 1440p HFR 1080p HFR 720p HFR 2160p 1440p 1080p 720p
3.) Englisch (DTS-HD MA 7.1) @4.151 kb/s Englisch (DTS-HD MA 5.1) @1.509 kb/s German (DTS-HD MA 7.1) @4.151 kb/s German (DTS-HD MA 5.1) @1.509 kb/s
4.) Englisch Forced (PGS) Englisch Forced (SRT) German Forced (PGS) German Forced (SRT)
That would be good. Then you start with the Edtion, Quality, Language and Subtitles you want to start!
Now it is pretty ■■■■■■
To me a Version of a movie could be many things. Cloud be you have the same cut of a film in different resolutions (ie HD vs FHD vs UHD). Could be you have both the theatrical and extended version of Avatar or Lord of the Rings. Either way the Play Version dialog should Show you What is different between the files of a movie is. This would include the file name. Or a customized name.
When the Play version dialog is shown Plex should do something like the following
if one file has a different resolution/bit rate/audio etc display that on all versions.
If the file name edition title in it show that.
3 If all files have the same resolution/bit rate/audio etc and Plex cannot determine a custom title show the full file name.
The Edit title dialog should probably also allow the server owner to edit the shown title of a file Probably best to do that from the Info Tab.
Also, I’ve up-voted. I have a couple of movies with more than one edition that I’ve split apart and would rather have them as one, but not in a collection.
Bumping this as it would be great to have this. Being able to have multiple versions of the show and be able to choose which one to watch would be awesome.
I would like to see this as well. My daughter watches a lot of Paw Patrol and since there are two episodes per number there is no way to tell the episodes apart without the name.
I noticed that when creating an optimised version you can set a name when choosing custom quality settings that shows up when you go to play version so that field shouldn’t be too hard to become editable for versions in general.
I’d also like to bump this. I have Subbed and Dubbed versions of Godzilla films on my Plex that often times have the exact same info in the provided versioning options. Including filename would make switching between the two considerably faster than the “eenie meenie minie moe” method I’m currently using.
