Ripping DVDs and Blu Rays to .mkv files. Putting the extra features in the directory structure described in Plex guides, which works quite well.
The problem is the shorts. You know, the shorts that Pixar and Disney are including with every one of their animated movies. I don’t have a good enough memory to remember that the short “Lifted” accompanied the movie Ratatouille. So I search for Lifted in either Plex Media Server, or in my front end app (Plex Home Theater), and the search does not find the short. Well that kinda stinks. How do others handle this?
A Post-It Note?
I guess ‘Shorts’ tall enough to ride the rolly-coaster at TMDB could be included in a library just for Shorts:
Lifted (2006) : https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/13060-lifted
But then the question is how many of these Shorts do you have and are there enough to dedicate an entire library to them?
Some would say the same about my ‘Bond, James Bond’ Library that only has, well, 25 items in it, but they’re danged easy to find when a Bond-A-Thon Weekend comes around. Even easier than the somewhat dysfunctional Plex Search System can deliver.
Something could be done on a Plex level I guess, but I don’t know what nor do I believe it would ever happen. Plex seems really disinterested in ‘the little things’ these days that for some are bigger than Plex thinks they are.
We’ve had Google search around for two decades. A post it note, lol. Really? I don’t live to watch movies, so no, I won’t dedicate resources to remembering what short goes with what movie. That’s the software search’s job. Much like Microsoft software, I’m beginning to feel that I must become an expert in the software just to get it to work logically. And like Microsoft, it seems that Plex may be a bit too overrated. Truly great software cares about all the functional details. Plex gets a lot right, especially when you take the time to name files the way they direct. But after having done so, if you can’t find some of the excellent shorts that various directors add to their DVDs and BDs (without separating them out), then truly Plex needs some more work.
My latest issue is that Plex isn’t displaying any thumbnails whatsoever in my photo library. Is that because there are videos interspersed throughout the library? Tough. That’s the way all digital cameras download photos/movies when you use Picasa or Sony Home Memories or whatever it’s called. Do you really think a user should have to spend hours separating these files when software like Picasa can tell the difference between a .mov and a .jpg and has been able to do so for a decade? It’s not a hard thing to program.
Rant off.
@onthuhlist said:
We’ve had Google search around for two decades. A post it note, lol. Really?
Sorry… these things just hit me along with the caffeine from that first cup. 
I hear ya. It’s no rant, it’s more a bonk over the head with a sock full of reality. In the interim from now until Plex develops a search solution (try to contain yourself) you could pick up your favorite shorts and paste them as extras with other movies that fall into a genre group that makes sense to you. That way at least you’d not have to remember exactly which movie it was packaged with and the odds would be a little better that you’d run over it when looking around.
I hardly ever put movie trailers in the same folder with the movie I’m about to watch. It makes more sense to me to put them with other movies instead and while I have them in the copy buffer they get pasted to many folders in one go.
