Stream audiobook on Plex

Hello
I am using Plex Media Server to stream movies, music and watch photo.
I am using audiobook player on my iPhone. I am quite short on space with my phone hence I thought that I could use Plex for audiobook as well.
My questions:

  1. Will Plex stream audiobook assuming they are MP3?
  2. Will it treat it similar to audiobook player I.e. continue to play from last place you stopped it last time?
  3. Where should I place it: movies or music Library

If you Encode your Audio books in mp3 and put them in an audio folder it will not remember location for resume.
I suppose you could encode it into an mp4 container with a blank video track and put into a movie library, then it will be able to resume.

If you wanted to get real trick you could encode the file with a single image as the video… (ie the book cover) and add the audio track as the book

Thanks for advices. I like it.
I could play with MP4 and see how it works.
I use for encoding Handbreak … Hence could you please elaborate how to encode 'with single image as the video…
Thanks

I do not know if handbrake can do that. (Or How to)
I use Corel Video studio and it is easy.

Maybe @JuiceWSA can tell us…

He is a handbrake Guru…

@JuiceWSA
Any thoughts???

Also, for some clients (I know this works for Roku and it also works for several of my other clients but I do not remember exactly which ones) if you simply rename mp3s to m4vs (or mp4s, I use m4v to give me visual identification of renamed files) Ples detects them as regular movie files with no video track and plays them fine giving full access to all trick play functions and remembering resume points.

You can even place chapter files in a TV type structure with the parent directory named as the book title and then a season 01 folder containing the chapters named s01e01 and so on and use Plex’s continuous play functionality to remember which chapter is currently playing and where you are in that chapter. (Use a separate TV type library for books with “Local media assets” to avoid some rather weird matches.)

It is far from the best solution and, as I said, at the time I last tested did not work for some clients but it does work for me and gives me a better way to listen to books through Plex that the unreliable partial support Plex kludged together.

There’s probably a way with Handbrake, etc but if you are not afraid to use the command line, ffmpeg works great.

ffmpeg -r 10 -loop 1 -i "cover.jpg" -i "audio_book.mp3" -tune stillimage -b:a 128k -shortest "audio_book.mp4"

where
“cover.jpg” is the name of the mage to use for the video portion.
“audio_book.mp3” is the name of the audio book file, and
“audio_book.mp4” is the name of your new audio book video.

I set the frame rate to 10 FPS (the “-r 10” part in the line of code above) Not sure how all plex apps deal with a low frame rate like that. If you just leave that out it will default to 25FPS, or you can assign whatever rate you think works best. I do know the files I tested work with the Roku and Plex web though.

Attached a short audio book I found on the internet, for you to see the ffmpeg encoding. I used an jpg image with dimensions of 480X480 for the image.

Well I tried but failed. I’m using Mac from terminal like this:
/Applications/Burn.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -r 10 -loop 1 -i “cover.jpg” -i “test1.mp3” -tune stillimage -b:a 128k -shortest “test1.mp4”
It throws the error: Invalid value ‘1’ for option ‘loop’
Then I remove this parameter and run like this:
/Applications/Burn.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -r 10 -i “cover.jpg” -i “test1.mp3” -tune stillimage -b:a 128k -shortest “test1.mp4”
It throws another error: cover.jpg: No such file or directory
Then I create a file cover.jpg and run it again.
Then I have another error: [image2 @ 0x1000400] Could not find codec parameters (Video: mjpeg)
cover.jpg: could not find codec parameters
Well I have 60 mp3 files in the book. Likely I could run it in a ‘for’ loop but it failed even with one test1.mp3 file.
Note: I simply renamed one ‘real’ xyz.mp3 file with test1.mp3
What could be wrong?
Thanks

@susja
Damn. Works on my windows computer. Perhaps a different version of ffmpg. Google helped me find a different command, maybe you’ll have better luck with it. It also works for me on my machine. Try

ffmpeg -r 10 -stream_loop 1 -i cover.jpg -i audio_book.mp3 -tune stillimage -b:a 128k -pix_fmt yuv420p -shortest audio_book.mp4

I left out the quotation marks, or you could tray sing;e quotes instead. They’re only needed when there’s a space in the filename. You might have to put the full path name too, if you haven’t change the terminal to the directory your files are in.

I also added the pix_fmt parameter here, my version did it automatically, maybe yours does not. After that, I’m gonna have to admit I’m lost

Well thanks for trying to help but it did not work for me either …
I’m going to give it up …
Maybe I’ll try to use Handshake …

Thanks anyway

Never mind - stream_loop doesn’t work for me either …
Perhaps a different version of ffmpeg and adding the pix_fmt parameter will lose that codec paremeter. error. My version reported the error, and automatically chose yuv420 by default. Sorry it’s not working for you.

So. Does that mean there is no way to play audiobooks in even if you place them in a audio file.

Well I have no doubt that it would play fine if I place it in Music folder since it’s the same MP3 file.
My concern was to handle stop-replay-resume option which is essential for audiobook.
It looks until one transcode or do some other trick it won’t work as regular audiobook.
It looks to me too much hassle hence I decided not to go this route.

@susja said:
Well I have no doubt that it would play fine if I place it in Music folder since it’s the same MP3 file.
My concern was to handle stop-replay-resume option which is essential for audiobook.
It looks until one transcode or do some other trick it won’t work as regular audiobook.
It looks to me too much hassle hence I decided not to go this route.

I don’t understand your problem. Plex has resume and ff/rw for regular mp3s. While it is far from perfect it does work on all clients.

I have used a program called mp3 joiner to join my multi-chapter audiobooks into a single mp3 file.

Also, as I said in an earlier post, simply changing the extension of a file from mp3 to m4v (or mp4) works on many clients as Plex treats the resulting file as a media file with no video track but it will play fine.

Neither of the solutions I use are perfect but they do work and they are little hassle at all.

I usually do not use Plex to play my audiobooks but it is not because they do not work but rather it is because I like the mini-computer running MediaMonkey feeding my whole house audio system better. (I have several cheep Bluetooth keyboards placed around the house to provide convenient play/pause control)

I tried running Plex on the mini-computer and it worked almost as well but I like MediaMonkey better for audiobooks as with it I do not need to artificially join or rename my books to get good operation.

I am not saying that Plex is perfect for audiobooks but it does work fairly well.

BTW: I do not care about metadata for audio books. All I need is author/title and that I have by the way I name my files. (I include the year first published as well) ex. “Dean Koontz (1993) - Mr Murder.mp3” (Or .m4v if I wish to play it in Plex.)