I’m talking about how Netflix and others offer up things in a more interesting way than just A-Z.
For instance, when I browse Kanopy right now, I have rows of movies presented like this…
Popular Movies
From Book to Screen
World Cinema
Once Upon a Time…
Summertime Cinema
Indie Dramas
Trending
Must See Classics
Oscar Winners and Nominees
The Criterion Collection
Directed By Women
Feel-Good Film
…so on and so on
Top unwatched movies is about all we got right now. I’ve tried using collections or making virtual libraries with symbolic links but it’s far from ideal, especially collections. Genres filters aren’t the answer either as you have to set and unset them, they’re sometimes wrong and it’s really not very interesting straight up. Perhaps they could be a starting point. A web service that can be polled to make interesting, dynamic sections?
Anyone else want to see something like this? Is Plex already thinking about something like this?
Many years ago I asked for the ability to “browse” movies in a truly random order based on nothing at all, just random.
I was met with derision and the ONLY suggestion from Plex was to use “shuffle.” I was NOT talking about “playing” movies but rather “finding” them.
I have a large, but not as large as some, library and browsing starting at “A” or “Z” and progressing through the alphabet means that I always see the same movies before I get to others.
When I am just looking for something to watch and have no preconceived ideas about what that might be I think it would be good to just browse randomly and that might mean that I encounter a great movie that I may have forgotten was in my library. It takes a long time to get from “A” or “Z” to “M” and the ability to browse at random just seems to make sense.
I expect that this, in all the forms suggested, will get ignored again as it is “Your movies your way” and not “Your movies Plex’'s way” and anything that is not “Plex’s way” is generally ignored by Plex.
There’s sites like trakt.tv and icheckmovies.com that could prove useful I haven’t really investigated what they offer. If something doesn’t already exists, perhaps the community or Plex can create it.
Not wanting to Drill for Genre or finding a way that suits my browsing style - while having all my movies in a single library (so everything will work) - I decided thinking outside the box was as good a move as any:
I consolidated 18 or so Movie Libraries into 1 in a Hail Mary and it seems to have scored.
Also Genre and the traditional as well. I have many collections that are now just sorted together within Genre or Year, but can be brought out as Features, to change things up a bit.
I have MCEBuddy automate recordings into The Movies or TV Show Libraries - I’ll take it from there.
I add everything else by hand and I know where it is - if I put it there. No ‘thing’ can possibly know what I want. If I have to go back later and fix it - I should have done it to begin with.
Do you know if you can create a collection and have collections in it…
Like a Collection of Years, and within that have collections like you have of the years.
