I have a Movies library and a TV library, because I’m told that’s how it has to be setup if you want the scrapers to work.
I see there is a shuffle button for each library, and that I can create smart playlists within each library.
What I’d like to be able to do is shuffle across both libraries. How can I best accomplish this?
(I’ve seen this question in older threads, in which the copy-and-paste answer is a link to “how to create a smart playlist”, but I don’t understand that suggestion when it appears smart playlists can not span libraries?)
Smart playlists only work inside a single library.
However you can manually throw your media in a combined classic (non-smart) playlist and shuffle that. Not pretty but it’ll work.
The issue with a self-managed playlist is that it’ll quickly be out of date, as soon as I add the next library asset. Not having to manually tend to it is exactly the problem I’m trying to solve (and which you’d think Plex would be a natural for, since the server already offers so much automation around finding new additions, scraping the metadata for them, etc.)
Not exactly what you’re trying to achieve (the actual use case… not just “shuffling”)
There’s a feature suggestion to support some pseudo tv mode where you define certain criteria and let Plex play some mix of that.
Thanks for the PseudoTV pointer, I gave it my vote. IIRC there was a popular PseudoTV addon for XBMC which I enjoyed quite a bit. It’s an awesome feature but of course a non-trivial development exercise (maybe a little less so if the original author is willing to contribute his or her matured UX and implementation.)
As a potentially much shorter development path, I wonder if it would be possible to extend the existing shuffle UX icon and behavior to the home screen or whatever UI level exists above the individual libraries? (or alternatively to allow a single library that can support multiple content types.)
