Previously, I was able to keep items in my watchlist even though they were already marked as played. But now, it appears that only items that only unplayed items show up in my watchlist. Is there a way to stop these from being automatically removed even through they’re “played”? I have movies that I’ve already watched that I want to watch again and watchlist was a great way to track that.
I’m very aware that I could just mark them as unplayed and add them to my watchlist again or filter by unplayed items, but that seems redundant. I added them to my watchlist for a reason. I don’t like them being suddenly removed automatically with seemingly no control over it.
You - like me - are using the watchlist as more of a “favorites” list to rewatch content without having to search for it later. The new “sync watch state” feature breaks that function for us. If you have a movie marked as watched in any library across multiple servers, then the watched state will also synchronize with the watchlist, which then removes the “watched” movie.
If you wish to avoid this behavior, disable watch state syncing. I brought up that question specifically in that forum post I linked, and it’s because it does this that I am not going to opt into watch state sync. (Not that I have any use for sync, since I only have my own server)
Favorites can already be handled in 2 different ways. There is no need to use the Watchlist for this.
You can add your favorites to a collection. (You could even publish this collection on your home page for all your shared users to see.)
Use the “star” rating. It exactly why it exists. Sorting or filtering by this rating is easily done. You can even store the filter as a smart playlist or smart collection, so you can have always easy access to your favorites.
I guess collections are close enough to what I’m looking for. It’s still a bummer that the change was made to watchlist and now my entire watchlist is empty and I don’t remember what was on it. I had the same thing happen to me a few years ago when trying to do the same thing with a playlist. I guess I’ll see you in a few years when this collection gets wiped out for some reason…
Favorites-as-a-collection cannot combine items of separate libraries, nor can it combine items of different library types. I have 3 different movie libraries, and 3 different Show libraries. Being able to add any item to my “watchlist” and have it show up on a combined alphabetical list for later consumption beats out anything Plex offers otherwise.
If people are using it this way I think there is a need. Just about every media consumption app has favorites list you can add things to easily. It’s a lot easier to click “add to watchlist” then it is to make a different collection in each library
Inside the collection all those libraries aren’t displayed as one list. They are broken into pieces by what library they reside
If you don’t have a plex pass you can’t add the collection to the home screen which means you have to go search collections tab that might already be filled with 100’s of other items
When you have a large collection alphabetized. Say you scroll down to the middle of the into the movies that start with “K”. You click into a movie and view its description. Then back out. It takes you all the way back to the beginning of the collection into the A section and you have to scroll all the way back down to “K” where you left off.
Drives me insane
As you can see even people who know Plex pretty well don’t know this option exists. I didn’t either for a long time
Easy and user friendly are what people are looking for. It’s more difficult and confusing than it needs to be
I’d forgotten that dumb collections do allow cross-library mixing but… it’s not very handy.
I would have to “pollute” each item with special collection if I want them in this favorites collection.
Only the admin can add to or remove from this favorites option (all users in my house, including me, use managed accounts).
You cannot add to or remove from this list while on most player apps (most viewing is done from an android Shield app).
You cannot quickly add to or remove items from this list (you must edit each item one by one and pick the correct collection label).
To find the collection, I’d have to go to the library and find this collection (thanks to sort title, it can be at the top of the list). Not only that, but the items specific to that library show up first.
Items in this collection will not inter-mix between the library types like they do in the watchlist.
Items in this collection are not unique per user. Anyone else can see the items in this collection, and may get upset if I include everyone’s favorites.
If I set this collection to be visible on the home screen, it shows up for EVERYONE. So I cannot just create a separate collection unique to each person AND link to this collection on the home screen for just that one user.
A while back, I tried to make a sort of “dynamic” favorites item using a custom collection. I wanted a managed user to be able to add a show to this, by using the ratings system. Since we don’t otherwise use ratings, we could set it to “5” and it would get added to this collection. I then was able to add it to the home screen.
But, as I said above, this showed up for every user. It wasn’t intuitive on how to add an item to these collections. Anyone could mess with it by adding/removing ratings. Being a smart collection, it didn’t combine items across libraries.
When I found the watchlist didn’t automatically delete and entry upon viewing, I at first was annoyed. I wasn’t planning to go back into the list and remove the item after watching. So as a watchlist it lost some luster. I still like the idea of marking some recently added stuff for later viewing, but I found the better use for it was a kind of favorites list. And since all library items go into this list, even better for me.
My only gripe with it now is that it takes an extra button press or two in order to view the content from my library. Not sure how we could set it to skip straight to my entry on the first click, but I’d like that.
