It would be very helpful for me—and others doing the same thing—if resource-demanding tasks (such as Intro Detection) could be run only once per video file. Let me explain.
For a number of reasons (mine being users with different preferred languages), one may have two libraries that point to the same directory (in my case, one for French metadata, the other for English metadata).
The issue is that both of these are considered completely separate and independent. Plex is unable to realize it when the files are the exact same on disk (same path and everything, not just same hash). It would be a no-brainer optimization for the server to simply notice this (either via path or hash) and just copy intro/credits markers over. Instead it does all the computations a second time. What makes it even worse for me is the video files are mounted via a network share!
While this may seem niche, creating multiple libraries has its uses and there may be overlap between sections. You may also extend this to all the (numerous) cases where people keep HD and 4K copies of media, sometimes in separate libraries. I am surprised this isn’t already a core feature of Plex!
As a side note, it would be a sane alternative in my case to just allow metadata to be configurable to show up in another language for some users, but Plex does not allow that either, so I was left with creating copies of my libraries.
