Playlists can be made only of entire media items, but some items like music videos or TV series, or multipart movies would sequence better with the beginning and end or other features removed.
It would be great if playlists could take an edit decision list (3.7. Edit Decision Lists (EDL)) for each item in the playlist and implement the edit automatically while streaming.
It would be a boon for curated playlists
Use examples:
You could have “just the songs” view of The Sound of Music or your favourite musical.
You could have a playlist of all episodes of The Mysterious Cities of Gold but without all the opening and closing sequences, without all the previous-episode catch-ups.
You could have a playlist of JUST the episode catch-ups for a series digest.
Maybe you want to make a fun-movie drinking game and blank some classic phrases from the movie and the first one to fill it in gets a drink.
Maybe you want to chop the silent end of your music videos, so you can have continuous music.
Maybe you want to skip commercials without having to edit the recording
An EDL lets you specify which parts of a movie to cut. An EDL playlist is a playlist of EDL+Movie.
There’s nothing magic about it.
I love the description from Kodi’s Wiki talking about this same feature they’ve had implemented for years:
An edit decision list (EDL) contains information about edits that should be made to the video during playback. Edit decision list information is contained in a separate file to the video that is read by Kodi just before the video is played. Examples of use include can be to skip commercials, cut out content inappropriate for children, or skip over the half hour acid trip in 2001: A Space Odyssey .
There really is no end to the use cases this could support, including the eradication of Jar-Jar…
Really, Kodi’s implementation of EDL and other similar file types really is a great basis for similar support in Plex. Here’s the full wiki page: https://kodi.wiki/view/Edit_decision_list
I have been thinking about this type of feature for some time. I never realized that other players already had support for this type of feature. Gladly voting for this one.
This would be amazing and it doesn’t require a ton of development time from plex as it’s a simple skip or mute list for times on a movie that list would be manually created by a user and stored with the same name only an edl extention. It could be exactly like subtitles. This has so many uses. I didn’t even know mplayer had this feature.
Someone should look at a method of syncing from plex use an EDL and mplayer to edit and copy back to plex as edited then remove the file after playing until plex adds this feature. That would be amazing.
This should be implemented. This is non-destructive AND you get all the other added benefits of EDL files.
In the mean time, is there any solution to adding the EDL information as chapters in the media file?
This should definitely be implemented. It has been done in other open source software so it doesn’t need inventing from scratch.
I’ve used personal created EDLs as well as ones I have created here:
Works great with Kodi 18.5 and SMPlayer.
For any DIYers wanting EDL in Plex, this might be of interest to you
EDL Director
Could this be looked at please?
Request exists already:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/48969/edl-file-support
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.
So no one else thinks this is a good idea?
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’ve been working on chronological playlist for certain franchises, and I’m really missing a feature I used in DVD authoring back in the day.
Could we have an option to add timestamps on a playlist item?
Play X video from Y timestamp to Z timestamp?
That way I won’t have to cut videos apart to move sections around, then figure out the new timing for subtitles.
I know others with the same issue.
It’s an amazing feature we’ve lost in later years
i was just told about this thread after creating a similar one
how is your VLC testing going? would like to see a native version to plex tho..
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.
