i would like to use this list to make a playlist of all my MCU media. i want to be able to tell plex to play a part of a Movie or TV show that is in the “chronological order” in terms of where the sceen would take place in time. there is a list out there which specifies the exact media time codes that you should watch in order to get the chronological viewing to the exact parts of every TV show and movie. this would also be useful to take the back to the future trilogy and put it in chronological order.
so there would need to be a way to enter the time code that you wanted a media piece to be played from and then one for the end of the clip.
the only other way i can think of doing this is to actually edit the media itself and cut it into chunks and then make a playlist from those.
The way i see it the simple way to add this and more neat tricks to playlists is to add an optional start timecode and end timecode to each playlist entry.
That way if you wanted to reorder the way one or more movies play, play scenes from multiple movies, play episodes without credits, exc. all you would need to do is add multiple instances of the same or other movies.
We know plex already has the ability to start at a particular timecode because of the resume function. If it doesn’t already exist i would think a function to stop playing after a certain duration would be pretty simple add. And a big feature addition!
I too would like this. I thought about a movie I have that had deleted scenes AND a user generated scene. I could create a playlist that would glue them all together if this feature existed.
I have actually found that VLC Player has the ability to have playlists that play portions of any video. It takes a little bit of work but you can play pieces of a movie doing this. I am actually currently working on a breakdown of the MCU into scenes that I will then be able to generate playlists and play the parts in time line order.
I have proven the ability of VLC to play portions of a video file, but I haven’t yet strung them together. I think too that I need a way to generate the text in a more manageable way. I will probably need to build a database application that I can use to store all the bits of data in a way that makes it easy to build the VLC playlist file(s). I have used MS Access in the past for all sorts of databasing and I am fairly certain I can make the utility there.
I love this idea. I would like to use this feature to string together my favorite movie scenes. As a user I’d like the ability to add a “scene” of a plex movie to a playlist so I can watch several scenes from a variety of movies in a row. For example, Id like to string together all my favorite car chase scenes from gone in 60 seconds, fast and the furious, john wick, etc. so I can show off my home theater sound to my friends.
I would really like the ability to generate a URL that would commence playing a streamed video from my Plex server from a particular time code, to bring into feature parity with YouTube. I use this feature constantly as I often watch a long video, and then point friends or clients to specific snippets within the videos so that they don’t have to watch the whole thing and can just get the snippet or snippets.
Similar feature requested in 2015 (Feature Request: Video playlists with chapter support) but closed. Here is a more advanced use case:
I would like Plex to give the possibility to define specific chapters or timestamps we want to play from video files in playlists.
The goal is to generate “Party playlists” from concerts, bloopers, stand-up shows or sport videos, to randomize songs from different artists and alternate potentially with fun videos extracts. There are two steps in the process: first extract the chapters infos and then tell the player to read only some specific chapters/timestamps for files in a playlist.
Currently, we can do this in Plex only by manually splitting video files in clips and insert them in playlists, which is not convenient at all since we lose the programme coherence and the show metadata (duplicate shows, no easy way to play the whole show in order…).
Out of Plex, there is also no convenient way to do that and it require some scripting. I specify a bunch of videos I want to randomize and for each of them: first I extract Chapters timestamps with ffprobe/mkvtoolnix and then generate a MPV player’s command line with --start and --end options or it’s EDL file feature (https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.rst)
to specify the parts of files I want to read. Randomization is implemented on top of the script that generates the MPV command lines. As MPV player is used in many Plex implementations, it could be a quick win before generalization.
Ideally, the ultimate Plex feature would be to generate this party playlist automatically.
Either we create a new type of playlist (aka “Party playlist”) and every time we add a file to this type of playlist, it would add all chapters from the file as separate individual tracks in the playlist, so that we just have to play it in random mode and remove the chapters we don’t want to play with manual playlist edit. And for those file without chapters, we could manually edit playlist and add “start” and “end” timestamps, like A-B loops.
Otherwise we keep a single type of playlist and give the possibility to explose afterwards playlist tracks by chapters with a specific action.
Example of party playlist presentation: Concert1.mkv Chapter #0:4 RedBullSki.mp4 start 296.587958, end 725.182792 Concert2.mkv Chapter #0:2 Concert1.mkv Chapter #0:3 stand-up-comedyshow.mp4 start 525.5, end 825.48382
Such a feature would make Plex a step toward party entertainment and audio books playback, without losing it’s ADN.
