I am trying to figure out the best way to set-up a folder I have that is focused on Documentaries. I have tried to set them up as Movies, TV Shows and now “Other Videos”, but none seem to work properly. Here’s the issue …
The files can be either a single video/movie for a one episode show OR they can be a multi-part series. Most of these are recorded from the History Channel, but not all. Some are from my own DVD collection. The biggest issue is that I can’t take the multi-part series and group them all together, similar to a set of “episodes”. They all currently appear as their own shows. I would like to have them in a folder, similar to a Series and then each episode has its own title.
Any thoughts on how to accomplish this?
Further info:
if I do these as Movies, then I don’t see all the shows. It ignores the multi-part ones mentioned above
if I do it as a TV Show, some of the videos are not seen, which makes sense since they are movies
if I do it as Videos, they all show, but the grouping is not there for those episodes, even though they are organized in a folder together.
You cannot have that all in a single library. The best way forward is to have 2 documentary libraries… one for movie-type releases and one for episodes/shows.
Inside the movie-type library you can group individual items as collections.
Some users have opted to treat their documentaries as “other videos”, embedding all the metadata into the files and preferring that embedded metadata (instead of letting Plex look it all up from its online sources.
You could put them all in your regular TV and Movie libraries respectively and then create a collection called “Documentaries” in both libraries to collect them all together. The nice “trick” of having the same Collection in both libraries is that you will see across libraries with it as they’ll match up.
In the TV library Documentaries collection you’ll see the Movie Library Documentaries items broken out separately but listed there as well. Vice versa in the Movie library Documentaries collection.
Also, having them marked with Documentary tags for Genre (if they aren’t already) would allow you to filter your views or even create a Smart Collection around that genre label to automatically manage your “Documentary Collection”.
Just some additional ideas. I personally prefer to keep things in single libraries where possible as it tends to be easier to manage.
Thanks for both these replies. If nothing else, it proved that I did find a limitation. Well, at least in my eyes. It may not be a popular one, but that would have really helped.
I like the tag idea, but for the non-tech people in my house, that wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, that’s everyone but me.
I did also look at Collections, and they were cool. But once you set this up, it seems they just add that additional “group” but leave the individual shows still in there. That just created too much clutter for me.
Oh well… I’ll have to think this through. Maybe having Libraries for Documentary Series and another for Shows/Movies.
You can set Collections to hide their contents and then the only thing that shows in the Library is the Collection or you can hide the collection itself and it won’t show anywhere but in “Collections” tab.
You can also add that collection (dumb or smart) as a row on your Home Hub or Library Recommended hub if you wanted with various “rules” depending on how you setup the collection. For example, I have a “Nostalgia Action Movies” smart collection that puts together a random set of 12 action movies from the 80s and 90s. You don’t see that collection anywhere but on the collections tab but I added it as a row on my Home Hub and Movie Recommended Tab. In your case, a simple smart collection just using the “Documentary” genre would be pretty easy and self maintaining while you’d just have to make sure your documentaries were tagged as such (most likely would be from the agents). It could be sorted by when it was added, when it was released etc. You’d just build one of those for TV and Movie libraries.
If you’d like more info about how to do some of those steps let me know and I’ll put something together… it’s a great feature that makes managing niche content in the bigger library easier.
The way I did mine is create a new library for Documentaries since some are singles, some are series of episodes.
Since I like to keep my movies libraries separate from TV shows as well as Documentaries, I find it easier to organize it that way.
Since it is a TV Show group, you need to name the files with EP01 for single episodes. At least I know it works for me very well, and I don’t have to rely on collections using tags which doesn’t scale should you decide to upgrade your plex server hardware.
I tried this, but a number of my singles do not appear in the library. I can’t figure out why it is thinking they are (maybe) a movie or something else.
You can’t have movies and tv shows in the same library and have the agents work. @Hkok likely created a TV Show library and is naming movies as if they are TV Shows manually.
So, for example, the TV Show library will never match movies (as defined by TMDB\TVDB etc) so if you add a Documentary movie to a TV Show library it won’t match anything… or it will match a wrong thing… you then just manually put all the info and artwork in it yourself as if it’s a single episode TV series. TV Show documentaries will match, and your movie documentaries you will just kinda fake it.
Typically, people use the Other Videos library for faking it if they just want to have a library they manage themselves instead of using agents to automatically match.
I haven’t done it this way myself but I understand that’s a common option for things that just won’t match (home movies) or things you don’t want to match.
