Can’t have this but hey (checks notes) it sure was cool to fire up plex and see them pimping their own streaming service up in my face. 
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I would love to see this in plex!
Need this
We need this
yo dawg, we heard u like TIDAL and The Terminator (1984) with stereo AAC
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Running into this issue now with various anime series.
pls add
Would also love this feature. A lot of archive quality anime groups use segment linking. Currently having to use mkvmerge to put each part together which is quite painstaking. Please add this feature
There are some other feature suggestions for EDLs and the ability to play skip-censored “family friendly” editions.
These seem like really closely related features.
Are the anime groups using segment linking as a kind of de-duplication? “Every episode shares an intro/outro, so why store it in every episode?”
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Yeah. Opening and ending being about 2.5-3 minutes of a normal 24-minute anime episode, that’s an easy 10%+ total season/series filesize savings.
Yes, and it also saves them work from having to time the subtitles for the OP/ED of every episode. You might originally think that the timing should just be a straight copy-paste for every episode, but sometimes the series prologue or recap of an episode happens before/after the OP/ED, so it might change the absolute timestamp of a subtitle, but not the relative timestamp. Being able to say “these are the timestamps for all the subtitle entries for the OP/ED” and just redeploy it for each episode makes things slightly easier/faster in the whole process.
That being said, now that I’ve had more experience with how Plex “does things”. I can see why this is a difficult request to implement.
Ordered chapters for things like OP/ED have their filenames HARDCODED into each episode. So for example, if my tv series was called “xyz” and each episode of xyz references an opening credit scene called “my_op_scene-01.mkv” then that OP file cannot be renamed. This would (and does) wreck havoc on Plex’s scanner.
Plex wants every file in your library to follow a strict naming convention of “series_name-s1e1.ext”. If it comes into contact with a file called “my_op_scene-01.mkv” it could very well think that this is just a duplicate copy of episode 01. Since you cannot rename this file, as it’s hardcoded into every episodes .mkv file, this puts Plex into a bit of a conundrum.
Truthfully, I don’t think that this issue will ever get implemented now. Not with how Plex libraries are currently organized.
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Not quite. MKV ordered chapters work on segment UIDs, not filenames. You can rename or move the linked file all you like, and as long as the player (or media server) knows where to find the desired segment, it will work. Some players look anywhere in the current directory, the current directory’s children, some predefined set of folders, all files in an internal library/database, or any combination of those.
Since Plex scans all files and stores them in the library anyway, all it needs to do is save a mapping of segment UID → file. Probably the streaming logic would need reworking, but finding the desired video segment isn’t the big challenge you make it out to be. Neither is renaming the linked file(s)—all Plex needs at most is a conventional folder name for storing things like OP/ED that shouldn’t be indexed into the library, but that Plex still needs to keep track of. It could be a new Extra_Directory_Type that doesn’t generate a library entry.
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You are correct! I had moved the OP/ED files into a “Specials” directory and had just assumed that whatever was linking the OP/ED to the file must be hardcoded.
This was actually extremely helpful for me as I had given up and just thrown all of the OP/EDs out of the library because it was messing with the seasons (duplicate episodes showing up for episode 1 if the filename was something like OP01).
I tried renaming them to something like [title]-s00-211.ext but left them in the same folder and the scanner was smart enough that even though it’s in the “Season 01” folder, it still categorizes it as a special.
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This is still sorely needed…especially as the number of movies I have in multiple cuts continues to grow. Most of them use branched playlists on the Blu-Ray discs. It’s somewhat trivial to make a “deduplicated” .mkv that re-creates that file structure, but Plex can’t use it and I have to store an extra 20-30 GB.
If you have the time (and the energy) you can use hard links (unless you’re on Windows and using ReFS…why would you do such a thing?) to split and re-name MKVs using the .part001.mkv type of filenames that Plex’s library scanner knows to look for, but it’s a gigantic pain in the butt. The hard links are for storing the same file multiple times as a different “part” of another episode, or cut of a movie, etc.
It’s funny, I voted for this, forgot about it, remembered and complained again, forgot about it, and then I bought Salt and ripped it. lol
I’ve resorted to removing such movies from my Plex library entirely.
Ordered Chapter MKV of Salt with all three cuts in one: 27.5 GB
Storing all three cuts in a way Plex can access them: ~80 GB
So many great films could use this feature: Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Close Encounters, Amadeus, etc etc. Would be so great to not have to store multiple copies of films that are 90% the same but with some small differences.
