I realise this could technically be considered several suggestions, but they go together in their explanation and are thus pointless listing separately.
I recently added plex to my NAS, and the thing that I found odd is that there is no ability to correctly list a ‘shared universe’ within the Plex system.
I have multiple of these in my NAS- the aforementioned MCU and Monsterverse, and also the DCEU, and Arrowverse. Even Star Trek and Star Wars are effectively shared universes, comprising both Movie and TV Show type files.
To accommodate these in the simplest manner, Plex needs to:
a) Be able to have both Movie and TV in the same folder
At present the only way to stop this from failing to display TV files in a Movie folder, or vice versa, is to use the ‘general’ video option, which then removes the ability to do a ‘match’ for db info. TV shows should be readily differentiable from movies by virtue of the S01E01 type information in the filename, and should this fail simply giving a manual override option to change this would sort any issue that arises.
b) Be able to sort by filename.
Ordering by Title is clearly not going to work, and universes can have multiple movie releases in the same year- so that option is also out. But you can’t even accurately sort by release date, even if the metadata is all correct, as some parts of these universes are not released in the ‘correct’ order. Eg One Shots have a release date of the disk, which doesn’t match the cinema date of the movie they come with, and special editions like ZSJL will have a release date totally out of sync with correct watch order.
Side note- this is literally the default method of sorting these files!
More complex share systems could be implemented, but the above suggestions would cover the majority of what I think most people would actually need.
In addition, these options would be useful for many people in other shared folders.
Put simply, I’ve been collecting the MCU on both disk and in a digital folder since 2008, and have been naming the files accordingly (01 Iron Man, 02 Incredible Hulk, 02.1 The Consultant, etc) for this whole time. However…
The fact that if I want my TV to simply play through them in order, it is faster and less effort to transfer these files to a large USB drive than it is to try and get a shared directory in Plex to share that watch order is a bit of a black mark on what Plex should be able to do!
In actuality, I just use a simple DLNA and access the instalments in filename order, bypassing Flex completely, at present.
