Playback status is synced across separate libraries (Bug?)

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.25.5.5492
Player Version#:

I have created a library of movie clips that houses scenes pulled from specific movies that I would like to demo to test (show off) my theater when I get it done. I have started doing this and having plex pull the metadata for the clips. When there are multiple clips from the same movie, I organize them into collections and list each clip under that collection for that particular movie. The problem I have run into is that plex is syncing the playback progress between my demo library and my movie library for the same movie. This is problematic as the Demo clips are only 3-5 minutes long and movies are a couple hours. I realize that you can tell it to start from the beginning when you play it back, but it seems like plex shouldn’t be syncing playback between separate libraries.

2

It’s not a bug (at least in the sense that it’s operating as designed). This behavior is the result of the way Plex tracks playback progress. Playback progress is associated with a title’s GUID in the database (you can see this by viewing an item’s XML info). It doesn’t distinguish between the libraries the items live in.

You more commonly see this in discussions where folks maintain separate 4K libraries, or try to keep their special cuts of movies in separate libraries.

3

I guess I am not sure what the use case would be of it sycing between libraries. I kind of assumed that each library would have it’s own database.

4

If you have seen a movie, you have seen the movie. No matter in which library it stuck at the time.