I’m pretty surprised that this isn’t already implemented, but I have no idea how taxing it is on the server.
What I’d really like to be able to do is to set Plex up so that I could come home at night, toss something food-based into the microwave and start playing random episodes of episodic TV, particularly if I could set a filter to exclude, say, shows that have been watched within the past six months.
While I could do this with playlists as they’re set up, I’d need to build a playlist multiple thousands of episodes long, and then laboriously find and prune anything that’s been watched recently.
What I’d really like is to tag shows where it doesn’t matter what order they’re shown in as ‘Episodic’, and set up a playlist to filter for that, ideally with another rule for ‘Last Viewed’. I could also set up other smart playlists so that I could say ‘I’m in the mood for a Comedy from the 1950s/an episode of a show directed by Joss Whedon/a movie that’s both Film Noir and Crime/a movie with Russell Crowe that isn’t Action’ and be mildly surprised by what comes up.
There is a bug in the current Plex Web app which prevents this from working.
As soon as a newer release than 3.6.0 is out, it should be possible with this:
create a ‘Custom Filter’
in the 1st line use either ‘Genre’ or ‘Show Collection’
2nd line returns only episodes which weren’t played in the last year
After clicking on ‘Apply’, simply click on ‘Add to Playlist’
You will get a ‘smart’ Playlist, which you can play ‘shuffled’ in the client of your choice.
That would only work for the web app, unfortunately. It won’t work to set up automatically-updating playlists to carry across all platforms and won’t work at all on TV platforms.
@WarConsigliere said:
That would only work for the web app, unfortunately. It won’t work to set up automatically-updating playlists to carry across all platforms and won’t work at all on TV platforms.
That’s not true. Though you’re creating the playlist using the web app, the playlist is created at the server, and is auto-updated at the server. As long as the same user who created the playlist logs in on any other Plex app, they will see the auto-updated playlist.
That’d be true if it was a smart playlist, but OttoKerner was suggesting a custom filter, which is a one-use, web-only deal and saying that it was as good as a smart playlist.
That’s why I’m asking for smart playlists - because you could establish them once on the web app and port them, which unless I’m missing something you can’t do currently.
@WarConsigliere said:
That’d be true if it was a smart playlist, but OttoKerner was suggesting a custom filter, which is a one-use, web-only deal and saying that it was as good as a smart playlist.
That’s not true. If you follow my procedure, the result will be a ‘smart’ playlist.
That’s not true. If you follow my procedure, the result will be a ‘smart’ playlist.
So it’ll automatically update when new episodes/movies are loaded? You don’t need to jump back in and work out which things need to be further added/deleted?
@WarConsigliere said:
So it’ll automatically update when new episodes/movies are loaded? You don’t need to jump back in and work out which things need to be further added/deleted?
Yes, exactly like that.
You can easily distinguish smart from dumb playlists: smart ones have a small ‘cogwheel’ icon on their poster.
Because I don’t have anything on hand that I’d need to update a list with.
If you have 5 movies that match your smart playlist filter, move one of them out of your Movies folder.
Update your Plex library so that movie disappears from the library.
Create the smart playlist and verify it has the 4 remaining movies.
Move the 5th movie back into the Movies folder.
Update your Plex library again so the 5th movie is back in the library.
Verify that the 5th movie is automatically added to the smart playlist.
What if you have more than one TV library? I have my TV shows broken out into separate libraries - Cartoons (for the kids), Lifestyle (for the wife) and Prime Time.
Is there a way to create a Smart Playlist that would have shows from separate libraries?
This is a nice feature. I can see it working well for movies. For TV Series though it would be nice to have the ability to mix up the series in the playlist while ensuring that the episodes for each series is watched in order (If you want to watch a few series at the same time)
The whole separate libraries thing in Plex is so restrictive. A smart playlist being tied to one and only one library makes no sense. Sadly, I dont feel like that will every change since being able to search/link across libraries has been requested for literally years now. Emby definitely has Plex beat in this respect.
