Seamless Multipart Movie Play to Support Efficient Storage of Theatrical/Extended Movies

Feature Suggestions
1

If Plex could stream multi-part movies to clients as a single file, then the following strategy would work for supporting efficient storage of 2+ cuts of the same film:

  1. Complete back-up of blu-ray to disc.
  2. Determine the m2ts segment sequence for each version of the movie.
  3. Re-create the sequence for each version using (hard) link files to the segments, named as Plex parts.

As an experiment, I tried this with a single version of a movie, with step 3 looking like:

ln Disc/LIB95829/BDMV/STREAM/00520.m2ts “Knives Out (2019) - pt1.m2ts”
ln Disc/LIB95829/BDMV/STREAM/00514.m2ts “Knives Out (2019) - pt2.m2ts”
ln Disc/LIB95829/BDMV/STREAM/00517.m2ts “Knives Out (2019) - pt3.m2ts”
…

However when I tried to play (Synology Server, Apple TV client), there was a few second gap between the end of a segment and the start of the next.

If the client could be presented with what looked like a single m2ts file (or equivalent), then I could get multiple versions of a movie into Plex without taking up space with duplicate copies of shared video segments.

If this was possible, then two more simple updates would be useful

  • Extend the number of parts supported (currently 8) to something like 00-99 or even 000-999.
  • Support soft links - Plex didn’t follow soft links and the above only played with hard links. I use Synology as my server - other servers may work with soft links.

Thank you for your consideration,

S.

2

I haven’t experienced gaps playing stacked files myself; maybe I’ve got lucky or you had a particular bad experience.

There’s an existing suggestion addressing what you describe by utilizing some (more advanced?) features of Mattoska.

https://forums.plex.tv/t/x-in-1-mkv-support-ordered-chapters-segment-linking/8066

1 Like
3

Blu-ray M2TS files are not supported and will never be supported.

4

Thanks Otto.

I’ll look for a way to wrap each m2ts segment in an mkv container and will retry the experiment.

5

For future reference - I tried the experiment with remuxing each .m2ts as an mkv and then using parts. On a Synology DS918+ Plex server and Plex client on an Apple TV 4K, the sequence of mkvs do play, but with a noticeable gap between files.

I’ve also learned that chapter information is held in the .mpls files (obvious in retrospect), so even if the gap had been seamless, I would have had to make do without chapters.

It looks as if the only possible solutions to efficient handling of 2+ versions of a movie are the X-in-1 mkv support referenced by @tom80H or native handling of .mpls files, where the “interesting” .mpls files are named and referenced somehow.

Thanks for the input on this investigation.