One of these is a Theatrical Cut and one is a Director’s Cut. While your editions just came out, it needs MAJOR reworking to be actually useful. When selecting things, it should go macro to micro. Using Blade Runner since that is what Plex uses on its support pages…
Select overall movie entry: Blade Runner (1982)
Select movie edition, if available: The Final Cut, Theatrical Cut, Director’s Cut, etc
Select version, if available: 4K, 1080p, 720p, etc
Your current setup makes this impossible to set up correctly.
My proposal is to update the app like so (Multiple Editions - Feedback & Suggestions). Or at least let us rename the versions, or just show more file info that helps us determine the versions. Like the filename or video length or literally anything more than this basic nonsense.
My Plex Smart TV app that’s 4+ years old and is terrible actually shows the codec used (H.264 vs H.265), which is more than it shows on Windows.
Oh, and since I always need to say this on every Plex post: ALLOW US TO MANUALLY DO THINGS SINCE PLEX’S AUTOMATION IS TERRIBLE!
Yeah I was probably updating the original post while you were looking at it/responding.
My problem with their Editions addition is that its the most half-assed attempt at doing it. They added Editions but they didn’t do any proper integration or proper selection interface for it. Currently, you need to set up your library with every single edition as a main movie entry, instead of them all being properly underneath the main movie selection.
They also only made Editions available for Movies and not anything else despite Music by far having the most editions.
You can get most of the way there using a combination of collection, edition, and version support right now.
Set up your editions such that they make sense for your content (taking into account the differing versions/formats of each).
Create collections to combine those editions under a single, selectable item in your library.
Configure your library such that collections are shown in the Library view. (You can choose whether to show or hide the items in the collections at the library level and then override it in specific collections, if desired).
When browsing your library, select the desired movie’s collection. Then, play the edition you’d like, selecting the version you’d like when appropriate.
I realize this isn’t a perfect solution, but Plex has provided some tools to allow us to organize our libraries in a fairly customizable manner. Allowing for nested collections would go a long way toward improving the above selection, so that one could group their collection of differing editions of The Phantom Menace in their Star Wars collection. But that’s a different (already suggested) suggestion.
I suggest you comment/vote in those suggestions to avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes from each other. Unless I’ve missed some unique aspect of your suggestion I’ll close this thread as a duplicate.
Some more overlap can be found in the general feedback on editions:
