Hello Plex people.
I’m new to Plex and loving most of it, as it’s a very cool service.
The big issue that I’ve run into is the way you’ve structured libraries has a dichotomy of media either being a single movie or an entire season of a Television show. Anything that doesn’t fit those criteria is relegated to “other”.
This is more limiting than it needs to be.
•Libraries formatted for TV Shows require using a database agent that hunts out TV Show metadata.
•Libraries formatted for Movies require using a database agent that hunts out Movie metadata.
•Anything else written off as “Other Video”.
The Plex Video File Scanner, and the Personal Media Agent, just grab all the playable media and treat them all the same. They are all considered individual movies.
This isn’t the case though. There are sequences of video files that are not TV Shows.
If a user has gone through the trouble of organizing files into a subfolder on their computer (server), the highest probability is that those files are related, kind of like a season of a TV Show’s files are related.
Home movies, Video Courses, Tutorials, Inspirational Videos, Vacation footage… all of it… if it’s been organized into a subfolder, they should playback like a series. Just play them back in alphabetical file name order. Not every series of video files is a TV season.
As they are treated right now in “Other Videos”, to have any semblance of organization you have to set the library to folder (which is such a bland UI, and not the experience I’m after), then click into the folder, then click into the video, then click to playback the video… then the video stops (as everything in this is treated like an individual movie) when it stops it sits on a “Just played” page as if we don’t know what we just finished watching, so you have to click back, to get back to the page of the video you just finished, then click back again to see the video that is next in the series, then select the next video, click into it, and then click play to get into the next video. That is unusably convoluted and a worse user experience than just watching these videos on your own computer.
In a TV Show library, it auto-plays into the next video and tracks your progress in the series of videos.
Why not treat videos in FOLDERS inside of the Other Videos libraries the same way you treat videos in TV Show Libraries? The root folder is essentially the “Show” or in this case the type of videos, any subfolders are essentially the “Seasons” or in this case the series of videos. Users could put in their own poster.jpg files and background.jpg files to make their library look slick, just like they can in TV or Movie libraries.
This would make organizing your “Other Videos” library not have to rely on collections or playlists that have to be manually created. Existing folder structures on their server do all the work. No need for complicated filename syntax to account for seasons (s01e01) when these sequential files don’t belong to a TV Series or online database, they just exist in a subfolder and get played back like a series.
Just some thoughts from a user who has thousands of “Other Video” that are unusable in that library type the way it is, and don’t play particularly well with the TV Show library since these files aren’t actually seasons of popular TV programs.
Thanks
Ryan
