Can Plex differentiate between a theatrical release and a director’s cut or extended release? Do I need to tag them differently, or do something with the name?
I just asked the same question and was told there is no support for that. When Plex merges different versions of the same movie, I split them out and edit the movie title in Plex to show them differently.
There’s a very popular (and long standing) feature suggestion to improve the handling of multiple editions/cuts. That thread is also discussing various workarounds (one of them is the one described by boblinthewild).
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Wow, thanks for linking to this post @tom80H. I need to spend some time going through it to see if there are better workarounds than the one I’m using.
Do you put them in the same directory or different ones?
I put them in different directories, though I’m not sure it makes a difference whether you do that or put all the versions in the same directory.
It’s not too hard to split movies and edit the Plex movie title, but the painful part of this is if you later add another version of movie, or make a change to the file system name of a movie, the Plex scanner recombines all the versions and you have to go through the splitting/editing all over again. Fortunately that shouldn’t happen often.
I keep them in the same directory and just use brackets to help differentiate, e.g., [Extended Cut], [Director’s Cut], [Theatrical Cut]. I think it keeps it a little neater having them in one directory, but we all have our preferred ways, so was just confirming that it doesn’t make a difference as you guessed. I did have a couple in separate directories at one point but eventually combined them all.
Your comment about them recombining though I did want to make a comment on as well. That could actually come in handy if Plex eventually implements something in the future to handle this as we would then be able to recombine those movies and have one entry going forward that would then handle the different cuts. The other thing I noticed is that if you refresh the metadata for all the different cuts of a movie, after the last refresh the files recombine as well. I found this out when I think I was updating a movie with 2 different versions and I wanted/needed to update the metadata for some reason (could have been as simple as some cast images were missing and I wanted to see if they would update and after they did I updated the other movie).
Hopefully this is something that will get implemented in the near future, considering the age of the request, but knowing how things progress with Plex having been a user for so long, I’m not holding my breath.
-Shark2k
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I use the same method to differentiate - i.e., version names in brackets. I name the folders & files that way, and also edit the Plex movie title to include the version identifier (after splitting, of course).
I don’t remember exactly why I put versions in their own directories - perhaps so I could see my duplicates at a glance when I’m looking at the directory list. Now I’m in the habit of doing it that way, but if, as you say, there comes a time when combining them provides a benefit, I’ll definitely do that.
Interesting that you are seeing multiple versions recombining when doing a metadata refresh. I just tried that with a few of mine and I’m not seeing that happen. I may experiment with putting some into the same directory (as you do) and see if the metadata refresh results in different behavior for those.
Like you, I’m not expecting this capability to change anytime soon. I’m resigned to continue managing things like this for the long haul - but still hoping!
@boblinthewild The thread that was mentioned above regarding “multiple cuts of movies” has been going since 2012. For 9 years Plex users have been asking for this to be implemented and all we have received is silence.
Two ways to deal with this.
- Add them in as individual movies, split them apart in PLEX so they show up as duplicates, Check the info on each to see which one is which, and manually adjust the poster and name to match the films.
- Take advantage of the Local Media Assets functionality to shove them into an OTHER category (still wanting an Alt Version category) so that the other versions from whichever one you pick as the main versions will show up below the cast photos and after the trailers.
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