This is the quickest and easiest way I can think of to give a PseudoTV-esque quality to Plex for those that want to simulate bouncing around from channel to channel.
On a Playlist, where you can select “Shuffle” or “Delete” it would be nice if there were a third option like “Random” which would do as Shuffle does (select a random movie) and then go one step further by picking a random spot in the movie to start playing. When the current movie ends, start at the beginning of the next movie. If you don’t want to watch that particular movie, select Random again to flip to another random spot in another movie. It seems as though all that is required is replicating the shuffle feature with an extra option to start at a point between 0-100% the length of the selected movie.
At that point, you’d have something that mimics the randomness of flipping through movie/tv channels.
But why would you want to start in the middle of a show? For me, the main reason I use Plex for TV Shows is so I can watch what I want, when I want, and so I don’t miss any of it like I could on regular TV. Starting in the middle of some random show just seems like an odd way to watch something from my own collection.
@MovieFan.Plex said:
But why would you want to start in the middle of a show? For me, the main reason I use Plex for TV Shows is so I can watch what I want, when I want, and so I don’t miss any of it like I could on regular TV. Starting in the middle of some random show just seems like an odd way to watch something from my own collection.
I was thinking the same thing. One of the main reasons to have a personal collection is to avoid catching a show in the middle.
To mimic the behavior of PseudoTV Live, which is one of the more popular plugins for Kodi. It allows you to build channels based on your movie collection, complete with a guide, and then allows you to click through “channels” just as if it were a cable box with movie channels. It would be nice to recreate that experience with Plex. There are posts where people have asked for a PTV-like experience, but the Plex team doesn’t seem interested. I can imagine it’s a lot of work to implement, so I thought that allowing random starts in movies via playlists might be the closest thing Plex users could come to PseudoTV (while requiring minimal coding effort).
I understand what it is. Having your collection arranged in a TV guide format is fine and actually a nice way to present your collection if you don’t know what you want to watch. I just don’t get why people would want to start viewing from the middle. A TV guide layout where it played from the beginning, fine.
True. I’ll give you my vote just for trying to give the people what they want. Let’s see where this goes. The pseudo-tv request only has 66 votes so far, so it’s not looking good.
Thanks. I figured perhaps the vote count carried weight relative to the amount of work necessary to implement the feature. By describing what I felt was a pretty easy implementation, my hope was that it would require fewer votes than trying to outright replicate PTV for Plex.
Happy to wait for the Pseudo TV experience finally arriving at Plex though. It really helps on those days when I’d rather tune in, instead of going through the process of selecting a movie from a long play list. In addition, I’d like to be able to share my channels with friends.
