I have a great many custom and unmatched videos (including series with several seasons). The thumbnails for these are currently just black boxes.
Could Plex be able to select a frame from a video to choose for a thumbnail, or provide a way for users to scrub a file in the series for a frame to use?
Regards,
Brett Patterson
Unmatched movies should automatically take 3, unmached tv episodes take 2 “still shots” from the video.
You should be able to choose among them when you ‘edit’ the item in Plex.
If you have posters or episode thumbs in jpg format ready-made, you can put them beside the video files for Plex to use.
Hi Otto.
I should have also mentioned I’m running Plex Media Server on a QNAP NAS.
I have never had any thumbnails auto-generated from unmatched media. Perhaps there is a setting I need to adjust? I do not have posters or episode thumbs to use, and it would be too tedious to manually add them anyway. I am hoping for Plex to generate them from the video files automatically. So when you say it “should automatically take” 2 or 3 still shots, does this require something to be configured? Otherwise, why doesn’t my system do it?
Regards, Brett
Can you try this: Enable debug logs https://support.plex.tv/articles/201643703-reporting-issues-with-plex-media-server#toc-1
Restart the server
Then make sure your custom items are not ‘unmatched’.
(you can tell by the menu item: if there is a ‘Match’ menu item, then it is unmatched. If there are ‘Fix Match’ and ‘Unmatch’ instead, the item is already matched.)
On ‘unmachted’ items, perform ‘Match’, then ‘Search options’, then ‘Personal Media’.
Hi Otto,
I wasn’t quite accurate before. The individual episodes are getting an automatic thumbnail, but the season is not, and the programme itself (in the main Library) is also not—they are just blank. e.g.:
Programme (no thumbnail) --> Season 01 (no thumbnail) --> Episodes (thumbnails).
Note that the reason why they are not finding metadata online is because these are very obscure non-English shows. That’s why I would like Plex to be able to automatically choose a frame for the thumbnail.
Regards.
Gotcha, that is a genuine feature request, since that is not possible, atm.
I still recommend you to peruse the links above.
Ok, so do I need to do anything to make this formal feature request?
I can see why it isn’t being done because it’s only at the episode level that there is a specific movie file to source the frames from, but if Plex is going to do that, then it should be able to generate a Season frame and a Programme frame too, and using a random episode would be adequate for that.
Anything would be better (a LOT better) than just leaving the thumbnails blank.
Cheers.
You already did.
