Let me start this article by saying Thank You.
Having the possiblity to decide to watch trailers before we watch a movie is gorgeous. It gives us kind of a cinema feeling and reminds us to watch a certain movie we forgot about.
Having movie trailers is a great feature (a bundle of related features, that is). Thank you.
In addition, Plex offers a couple of settings to allow admins to decide about the kind of trailers that (library title trailers, cinema and blu-ray trailers, Plex streaming service trailers).
This is essential.
But as with all such features, use cases tend to be different.
While everything might be in order for some, others (like me) would love to see some evolvement of the already existing feature.
Now, let me dive deep into what my use case is:
- My wife and me are Germans and we tend to watch German language movies.
- Our library language is: German - all movies have German titles.
- Let’s make this use case more generic. Our library language is something non-English (NoEng) and all the movie titles are “NoEng”, too.
- The main movie libraries contain movies from more than 100 years of filmmaking.
- I like modern as well as classic movies. But my wife seldomly watches older movies.
Having praised the feature before, here’s what - from a NoEng user’s perspective is not so good.
(a) Many non-US movies don’t have trailers at all.
It’s hard to deliver stats about that, but for more Non-US movies than not, trailers are not downloaded at all.
Personally, I do understand this and if Plex does not offer a German trailer for a movie, I’m trying to use other sources to download and rename it as a local trailer.
From my experience, many blu-ray labels offer NoEng trailers (most of the via YouTube), so if a movie has a German blu-ray or DVD release, I do find a German trailer almost every time.
Maybe additional licensing possibilities could be explored by Plex for Non-English trailers.
(b) Plex downloads and offers a movie trailer - and then adds it as an extra to the movie in my library using an English title.
Wait a minute… somebody must be kidding me. Guys… me and my wife usually do not know the English title of a movie.
It does not only look ugly in the movie details page of Plex Web or other clients.
When watching “random” trailers before the start of the main movie, only the English trailer title is displayed in the player UI.
Watching trailers should inspire people to watch a movie. If I have a movie in my library and Plex adds a German movie title, then WHY is it using the English title for extras (incl. trailer)?
To be frank… you download extras… use the title of the movie that is being set by agents or the users themselves. I don’t like downloading local German trailers to replace other German trailers only because they are named in a strange way.
(c) No user setting available to limit the range of trailers shown.
As said before, my wife does not want to be bothered by trailers of classic movies. I love classic movies as well as modern ones.
That being said, I would love to have a user setting which allows to choose certain decades for trailers.
Other people maybe don’t like to see trailers for certain film categories like child movies or erotic movies… or would love to see only trailers for these categories.
I know that you are chcking the age rating of a movie and assume some things about which trailers don’t show. Maybe this is true for some use cases - especially with kids being involved. But leave the decision on that to the user.
Per-User-Option 1:
“show pre-movie trailers of all age ratings” or “limit pre-movie trailers or the following age ratings” or “let Plex handle age ratings for trailers intelligently”
Per-User-Option 2:
“show pre-movie trailers of all categories” or “limit pre-movie trailers to the following categories” or “show only pre-movie trailers of the same categories than the main movie”.
Per-User-Option 3:
“show pre-movie trailers regardless of how old it is” or “limit pre-movie trailers to certain decades” or “only show trailers of movies from the same decade as the main movie”.
(d) English trailers in a non-English library might be a “NO GO” for some.
Come on, not everybody speaks English - or wants to watch English content when watching movies.
For me, this is really a drama. I don’t want English trailers in my curated libraries. Giv me a way of getting rid of those.
There are a couple of ways of doing this:
- Give the admin an option for each library to only add trailers in the library language
- Give the user an option that pre-movie trailers ar bound to be in the same language as the library.
- Give the admin a way of deleting trailers downloaded by Plex (or hide them forever).
If you ask me, I would prefer to have all three options… I can replace a Plex-side English trailer by putting a German trailer to my movie folder. But if no such a trailer exists, I am still bound to hav th English trailer and can’t gt rid of it. And I’m bound to gt thos trailers in the list of pre-movie trailers whether I like that or not.
(e) managing trailers is next to non-existant
- Admins cannot manually rename extra titles
- Admins cannot manually delete or hide extras that are not appropriate
- Admins cannot filter for movies that have trailers
- Admins cannot filter for trailer languages
To make a long story short… if I as an Admin want to see if a movie has a trailer, I need to check out the details page. If I need to decide if I need to replace the trailer because of video quality or spoken language, I need to do the same… multiply this with the x-thousands of movies in larger libraries.
Come on… if I could set up a smart collection of movies without a trailer, or movies with non-German language audio tracks, this would help me a lot to curate my library.
(f) speaking of age ratings and their usage to limit trailers being shown as pre-movie trailers
At the moment, movies with the age rating metadata field being empty are excluded from the pre-movie trailer list.
No matter what some think of it… choosing age rating to be a limiting criteria for trailer availability is blocking hundreds of my movie trailer from ever being shown to me.
So, if you do not want to add all those user options to allow all age ratings for trailers I talked about above, there should be a way of handling movies with no age rating being set.
A way to do this would be to allow the user a “no age rating limit as we are all adults” option.
If you ask me, I would drop the “behind the curtain” age rating limit altogether and give the user that option.
I read in other threads that you are also working with age ratings to only show movie trailers that have similar age ratings than the main movie.
While the idea might be okay, you are loosing it half-way.
Age ratings are handled individually in almost all countries. You know that.
For example, if the main movie (in my German library) has no age rating, then you are assuming US/UK age ratings for allowed trailers. Of course, in a German library you seldomly find UK/US age ratings - therefore no trailers or always the same trailers from the few fitting movies are shown.
If my movie has an age rating of “de/12”, then you are allowing trailers from other “de/12” movies… but you are not taking into account “FSK 12” movies. In a discussion I had, I was told that with modern agents, this would not be set that way. But you ignore that “FSK…” rating is an official age rating in Germany and that the age rating field is editable by the user.
A possible solution for this would be a “corridor” in the code to decide on trailers.
Take you inofficial age ratings lik “de/…” and ALL official age ratings that can be found in the library at that time, and find an “age corridor” by wading through all avaialable age ratings.
Here’s a wikipedia table to start with:
(g) local trailers for non-local trailer sources
Users can choose to get trailers for cinema/blu-ray/Plex streaming trailers.
If an admin chooses to download a local trailer and offer that trailer to all users of the PMS, then this trailer should be a “preferred trailer” if users of that PMS are presented with trailers for movies that are also in the PMS libraries.
(h) Do not repeat the same movie trailer over and over and over and over… you get the idea
I have selected my playrs to play two local movie trailers before each movie. If I choose a movie without an age restriction (metadata field empty), then Plex chooses always to play the same single movie trailer.
This is because Plex doesn’t allow trailers from other “empty age rating metadata” movies to be played. Without the movie having an age rating, Plex falls back and chooses trailers from movies with US/UK age ratings. As I have a German library, I have only a small number of movies with these age ratings, and in my VRY BIG library, only one of these movies has a trailer.
Therefore, Plex shows me always the same trailer over and over again for each movie that I play (which does not have an age rating set).
While the age rating logic for showing trailers needs to be fixed, we also need a simple play history for trailers to avoid showing the same trailer to the same user over and over again.
You don’t want me to set fantasy age ratings for a couple of hundreds of movies, do you?
So, while having trailers is great, the current implementation bothers me a lot. Because everything presented to me or my managed users is important to me.
I really hope to have you on my side on this.
