I’m having some issues adding movies to playlists in the Web App on my Mac.
I have about 2000 movies in my library. I’ve gone through and added customized genres to about 2/3 of them, so that it’s easier to search through when I’m watching on my TV (through Apple TV). However, I just realized that I might be better off just creating a playlist for each sub-genre, once I’m done adding all of my customized genres to each movie.
The issue I am having is when I go to add a movie to a playlist. I have created a couple of test genres just to start out. But when I click on ‘add to playlist’, it doesn’t show any existing playlists to add to… only the ability to create a new one. Any reason it wouldn’t be showing exiting playlists, or a way to make those show up?
I’m not a hugely tech savvy guy, so the easier the answer the better
Are the playlists you’re trying to add to Smart playlists, based on filters, or standard playlists that you manually added everything to?
When you manually add an item to a playlist, it only shows standard playlists, because Smart playlists are based solely on the filters you selected when you created the playlist. The only way to add an item to a Smart playlist is to tag the item to fit the playlist’s filter settings. For example, if the smart playlist is based on the filter “genre = Science Fiction,” all you have to do to add a movie to the playlist is to tag it with that genre. It will automatically be added to the playlist.
Thanks for the reply! I wasn’t trying to create smart playlists. When I was trying to add a movie to the playlist, I’d get the screen showing “add to playlist”, with no clickable icons for specific playlists. There was one time that a single playlist showed, but haven’t been able to recreate the conditions that got me to that point.
What I’ve done as a workaround for the time being is to just start going back through my files and tagging them with the collections that I want. This is creating pretty much the desired outcome that I was looking for, with the only exception being a lack of sorting functionality. It’s just defaulted to the standard chronological release date sorting. I’ve created a number of sub-genres, so I don’t think it’ll be too much of a problem.
I should say that I am not currently a Plex member. I was for about a year (kept putting off the lifetime pass), and now I’m just waiting til I’m no longer unemployed to get back into it. Not sure if that changes the functionality that I’m experiencing.
I only have the one playlist in their now, but it’s a manually created playlist. Essentially, if I want to create a specific playlist I’ve had to click on multiple movies that fit a criteria (e.g. ‘Movies about Music’) and then I can manually create a playlist that includes those movies that I’ve selected. But once that playlist is created, I haven’t been able to add any additional movies to it.
Sorry, had sent a reply but realized I had a friend’s server (in my sidebar) showing his email address.
Okay, that’s a standard playlist, so yeah, I don’t know why it wouldn’t be in the list.
Can you provide the version numbers of your Plex Server and the Web app? I don’t know where to go from here, but that info may help someone figure this out.
Is the movie you’re trying to add from your own library, or one shared by your friend? Don’t know if that makes a difference - just gathering info.
Yeah, the gear icon is still showing in the upper left. Is there a different way to create a manual playlist other than just clicking multiple movies and clicking the ‘add to playlist’ link in the kebab menu?
Okay, so it looks like I had inadvertently created a smart playlist through one of the filter kebab menus. When I went into the specific movie and created a playlist from that menu, it now shows up in the playlist menu as something that can be added to.
Now that I have both options at my disposal, I figure I’d get your take on these things. Which do you prefer for basic watchability? Collections or Playlists?
Essentially, the reason I’ve had to go down this road is that I’m currently using a fairly old iMac (not able to upgrade at this point) for access to my server. I have my Movies and TV Shows on two separate 4TB/6TB hard drives. I then run an AppleTV to play files on my TV. I’ve been having some major buffering/encoding issues with the system, that I suspect is due to the age of the computer. I recently learned about using the Infuse App on my TV as a way to bypass that issue for the meantime, and it’s worked great. Only issue is that Infuse doesn’t have a great ability to sort by genre, and my genre additions aren’t showing up on the Infuse end.
Thus, I’ve gone to creating a playlist/collection with the idea that it’s easier for my wife and I to search specific genres, rather than having to search the entire 2000 file movie library every time we want to watch a movie.
I should also say that I’m not currently adding new movies. Moved from Canada, where it was not really cracked down (not sure it actually is in the US, but being a permanent resident, don’t want to rock the boat). So the need for a smart playlist isn’t as practical for me.
Only difference I can see right now is that Playlists sort alphabetically, where Collections sort chronologically. I’m sure there are a lot more differences between them.
