It seems that there are two preferred ways of dealing with editions. Those who consider an edition as something independent and those who would like to have the editions combined.
Currently, with the newly implemented feature of editions, there is only the first option. Here I wish that at least the general possibility to deactivate this and to combine editions into one is made possible.
A more flexible solution would be if the preferred method could even be selected independently as already suggested by AmazingRando24 in another post:
Separate folders: Separate entries
Common folder: Entries are combined
Personally speaking, the “other editions of…” hub has grown on me – I like that you can see more than just the name, e.g. if you have a different poster, description, rating or even release date. Except obviously it should be more prominent on the movie’s header (or next to it).
Still it’ll be great if you could have a visibility option per edition and hide any number of them (or none) except 1 item which you deem to be the main edition. Could be an optional tab when editing a movie with editions where you can (a) see the different editions, (b) name them (currently on General tab, (c) set visibility for each (hidden/visible in library) – optionally (d) sort them.
This way you get to decide which items show up on the library screen and which are only accessible through the Other Editions of... hub of the visible item(s).
Yeah I guess thats personal flavor. I have to admit it is not to bad to have a good overview if the data is there. For me the most important part is hiding the editions from the grid. Because currently I have to distinguish between editions by covers that I don’t have which makes it much harder to use.
Yes, Multiple Editions should be treated similarly to Multi-Version Movies, allowing users to select their preferred edition during playback. Currently, there is only a “Play Version…” option. I propose the addition of a “Play Edition…” feature, enabling users to choose and switch between editions during playback. This would also allow for multiple editions to be consolidated into a single item in the interface.
This 1000% needs to happen. With multiple editions or formats (1080p vs 4K). If there is more than one, when you hit play a menu should come up to ask which one. OR AT LEAST make it an option, which I think most of us would set.
Casting my vote for this for combining editions into one.
You should be presented with the choice of edition when clicking on the movie while browsing. That would be similar to how DVDs and Blu-rays do it and would force users to see it.
I want to make sure that Plex knows that I appreciate them implementing Editions. It’s a step in the right direction. Now, we just need to fine tune it to really make it worth our while. I believe this is the path we need to take. This implementation I think is the way to go (Mockup)
The current way Plex is managing Editions is impractical. At first I thought it was just me (different people have different preferences), but multiple friends and relatives with acces to my PMS have brought-up this subject.
When you’ve got three editions (not versions) of the same movie, there’s really no need to display them as separate tiles in the overview. Ideally you’d just want to select the movie you’d like to watch and be presented with a pop-up asking which edition (if there’s more than one) you’d want to play. This has been part of many Home Theater Software solutions (i.e. Kodi) for ages and isn’t that hard to implement.
Since no one liked the current editions implementation, I’ve “abused” the versioning mechanisme to refer to multiple editions. This is working much better, except that you only see the bitrate and resolution when choosing a version (in my case the edition).
I’m guessing many people (I might be wrong, let’s see if this gets any votes at all) would love to see more ways to address editions.
It’s beyond me why this hasn’t been implemented 10 years ago already. I love Plex, but sometimes their library management choices aren’t that well thought-out. I’m guessing they should pitch new ideas/features to “normal” people before they implement them.
They decided to solve the issue from a technical standpoint, which made sense at first, though it wasn’t always user-friendly. But then they stopped midway and shifted their focus to something else.
From their perspective, they needed a mechanism to allow importing the same movie more than once. Before they introduced editions, everything was tied to their internal unique ID. Importing the same movie as a different edition didn’t create a new unique ID. While they addressed the technical challenges, it seems they didn’t have enough time to develop a user-friendly interface.
I think they built on an existing UI mechanism to avoid reinventing the wheel on every platform. What users often don’t realize is how much time it takes to implement features across multiple apps and platforms. If they reused a mechanism, it saved them time and still gave them the ability to support multiple editions. It’s a typical strategy - focusing on 80% of the features while only investing 20% of the time, instead of the other way around.
But yeah, in the end, I agree. It’s a shame that, even after two years, this feature hasn’t been very useful to me.
Version selection worked exactly like this in the beginning and for a really long time (a popup to select version when hitting play). I’m glad thay removed that annoying popup and replaced it with the smart version selection we have today, because the popup caused major trouble with friends and relatives having no clue what to choose and/or making idiot choices at the version popup.
I’m open for better ways or options with edition handling, though. But I’m totally fine with the way editions are implemented at the moment, it exactly fits my needs.
Possible issue is that Editions don’t work with Discover features (for various reasons - some of which are valid such as having to pull data from user local library to their servers which would void some privacy functions). Plex uses Discover for a lot of it’s title relationship functions but the use of folder structure to sort it out seems like it might work in this case.
In most cases I use collections to group multiple editions together but that doesn’t always work (particularly if you want a movie to be in two different collections with different visibility rules) so I like the mockup example as an alternative.
Skipping the editions function itself you can get something similar by using the extras function and naming multiple versions as “other” extras - this would put it in the same page with the original movie similar to the “other editions” hub. I think it was recommended in the past to maybe use that feature and expand the options to allow “Director’s Cut” type or customized options and maybe instead of those “edition” functions just going in extras the different editions named as extras could be displayed similar to the linked mock-up while leaving the actual “extras” in that extras hub.
Just some thoughts on it… I’d like to see more support for Editions functionality either way but I’m pretty happy it exists at all.
I’m sorry, but if your friends and relatives have a nervous breakdown when having to choose between “Theatrical” and “Director’s Cut” you should ask Trump to build a wall around them instead, because then they’re not suited to take part of any modern society. Even my 7yo daughter understands the difference (English isn’t even her first language) and she will pick whatever version she feels like seeing.
