Greetings, I have used Plex for years now and I have a decent sized collection of my favorite movies within it. I watch it from Roku, web and Android apps.
One thing I keep wishing for is the ability to select movie categories in the different players. In other words, hey I want to watch an 80’s movie or I want to watch a Sci-Fi movie. Right now unless I make a separate library (and I do have some of those) I cannot choose a category or what I might be in the mood for.
If Plex could have categories, either manual or automatic that could be selected from the UI that would make it next level in my book.
I am not sure if this is something tracked by Plex currently (I know it is aware of genre) and so I am not sure how much work would need to be done for this so I apologize in advance. But even if it was completely manual it would be better than not having the ability at all although something automatic would be far more intuitive and user friendly, especially with larger collections.
Apps on different players will look slightly different… however they all should be able to filter your library by certain criteria — e.g. year, genre, certain artists/directors, collections, content rating… even technical criteria like available audio/subtitle languages. I believe what you’re looking for is already available https://support.plex.tv/articles/navigating-the-big-screen-apps/
Thank you for the quick replies. That was indeed helpful info.
However, the fact I have used Plex for a number of years and was not aware of that ability sort of speaks to how clumsy it is to find it and use it.
I did just now go through it and it is aggravating to use (and that’s from the web on Roku that would be very painful) and the category feature is limited only to genre by default. Although I see you can manually add more Genre’s but you can only select from the limited set that are available in the list?
What I am talking about here is something more automated, rich and in your face. Meaning it is easily accessible from the front page and or could be pinned to the sidebar (or even searched). Also it would be great if this worked across all your libraries and not a single one. My use case there is I have multiple libraries/folders for the sake of permissions.
Please keep in mind I am not disagreeing with anyone, this is just my opinion based on how I utilize Plex.
The list of genres is dynamically populated according to what exists in your library. So if none of the movies in your library have the “SciFi” genre tag, for example, “SciFi” will not appear in the list.
Yup I get that. One of my thoughts is though that dynamic genre list is very limited and there is not much you can do with it easily. What I am advocating for is basically the expansion of that function. Another words more genres or categories and tagging movies with multiples of these automatically. And then allowing these categories to be pinned or searched for like you can do now with libraries.
Think of the way Amazon Prime or Netflix will tag a movie with multiple categories that can functionally be used for searching etc. This is what I am suggesting at the end of the day.
I think we are getting lost in the specifics here. OK so it auto tags with multiple genres. My point is what it is doing now is not adequate. There should be many more categories, well beyond just genre. It would be nice if those could be customized but that would of course mean movies would have to be manually tagged. I know this is generally not feasible for larger collections.
Furthermore, if we could do more with the genres or categories like search or pin to the sidebar like we can with libraries that would be super useful.
As it sits , to access the info everyone is pointing out takes a few clicks and that’s on a PC. If you are on a TV based device like a Roku that situation takes a couple of clicks too. What I am after is having this info on the surface so that you can do something with it in the way of selecting a movie in said category or seeing a selection of movies in that category.
Additionally it would be great if genre or category was represented in the GUI automatically. Meaning , for example, that maybe your top 10 categories were auto displayed on the front page of Plex and you could click that category to see other movies in that genre.
There’s already a number of feature suggestion for addressing this – quite similar with slightly different aspects.
Don’t get me wrong… I see where you’re coming from / what you’re aiming for. Not saying I’m a fan… I feel this will simply move the cluttering – but everybody has the right to their own preferences.
That being said… if you’re aiming for one of the above suggestions… let’s close this one to avoid yet another duplicate thread that distracts votes from existing ones.
