Wow. I had given up on the possibility of Plex ever implementing official audiobook support.
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One thing I really would like is inline/nested collections. I would like my Plex Library’s Album view to have a single entry for Harry Potter; The Lord of the Rings; The Wheel of Time; A Song of Ice and Fire; Women’s Murder Club; et al. Just like inline collections are handled in TV Show and Movie libraries.
- Related to that, I would like audiobook collection covers to support square covers.
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I would also like both the track/chapter progress and the book progress to be shown in the Now Playing UI.
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Regarding embedded chapter marks in m4b audiobooks, there is a problem in that two formats for embedded chapters exist: Nero, and QuickTime. Most software I have encountered only utilizes one or the other, and it’s not always the same format.
An example case: I had a single-file m4b audiobook. I edited the embedded chapter titles in mp3tag. Media Player Classic detected my tags; Audiobookshelf did not. The dev of Audiobookshelf says it uses ffprobe to detect chapters. So apparently, ffprobe reads QT chapters not Nero chapters; mp3tag edits Nero chapters not QT chapters. I’m not aware of any software that 1) has a GUI and 2) edits embedded QT chapters in m4b files.
As a result of this, I track-split all my audiobooks by chapter, because tagging track titles is a better solution for me.I’m just letting you know, if you’re going to support embedded chapters (which you certainly should), you’re probably going to get support tickets regarding embedded chapter marks not being read, when the user edits chapters using the format you don’t support. …Unless you could tell the Plex server to specify what chapter format you want its scanner to look for.
EDIT: I have discovered that ffprobe can actually detect both types of embedded chapters; and that mp4chaps can create chapter marks and convert between one type and the other.
