Unified Series Collection Option

Feature Suggestions
1

The Problem: There are some series that go together in a Universe & which must be watched together or things will either not make sense or will be spoiled.

Some of the biggest Examples:

  • The Arrowverse
  • Marvel TV/Cinematic Universe

But there are others, those ones are just the most annoying. I’m sure the Star Wars series like The Mandalorian & Book Of Boba Tea will deal with more of those issues as that grows as well.

Some of the big problems are crossovers that cross 6 series

  • Supergirl 5.09, “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part 1”
  • Batwoman 1.09, “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part 2”
  • Black Lightning 3.09, “The Book of Resistance: Chapter Four: Earth Crisis”
  • The Flash 6.09, “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part 3”
  • Arrow 8.08, “Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part 4”
  • Legends of Tomorrow 5.08, “Crisis on Infinite Earths: Part 5”

There are complicated viewing order lists that help… But it’s a lot of work to follow them if you are watching them any time other than when they are airing.

I have made this suggestion to both Netflix & Disney+, but obviously neither has implemented anything.

The idea is to have a way to watch the shows in the proper order with the crossovers. This, in most cases, can be accomplished by watching episodes in airing order across multiple series, but the problem is that you have to go & hunt for them, there’s no easy way to have them link together.

That’s where the Suggestion come in
For a series collection give us the option of :ballot_box_with_check:Unified Series that we can check on or off that will then enable a Unified Play that will essentially play the episodes from all the series in aired order together.

So when we finish Supergirl S05E09 the Up Next will then have Batwoman S01E09 as the next episode instead of Supergirl S05E10

Also the [Unified Collection] should be treated as though it is a show for the Continue Watching on the Home Screen.
So it will have the Collection Name & Cover so you are watching DC Universe or Arrowverse or whatever you named your collection instead of having all the shows in there as separate entities.

Anecdote: I personally fell off of the Arrowverse because of this problem. I tried catching up on a single series & had other series spoilers or all of the sudden be in episode 3 of a 5 part crossover episode.
I tried recording them all & using Plex to create a Season Playlist, but I have to find where I am & scroll to it every time I stop & then they started crossing over series that didn’t air on TV but were only available streaming.

Anecdote: I recently tried watching Hawkeye on Disney+ but discovered that there were spoilers in it because I didn’t watch Black Widow 1st.
There should be an easy way to fix this, If I had a Marvel Cinematic Universe Unified Series it would have shown Black Widow before Hawkeye.

Ideally I’d like to see the Movies mixed in as well, Agents of Shield did a good job of crossing over with all the Avengers movies that came out while it was running which was great if you were watching each episode as they came out, but going back it would be harder.

The movies I think would be probably more work but something to shoot for. The series I think should be doable.
It would be nice to have other features like the ability to manually sort the episodes if there’s something like a series or special episode that aired later that goes in between, similar to how we can manually drag & drop in a collection of movies, but that’s ideally, even without it the feature would be a great improvement.

Other Uses: I can also see this being useful for other things if people wanted to to just have their weekly airing shows play together in order, You could created a Fall 2022 Unified Series Collection, mark it as a :ballot_box_with_check:Unified Series & then hit play & the shows will air in order (List is random)

The Neighborhood (CBS) Episode 1
The Cleaning Lady (Fox) Episode 1
The Good Doctor (ABC) Episode 1
The Masked Singer (Fox) Episode 1
Young Sheldon (CBS) Episode 1
The Neighborhood (CBS) Episode 2
The Cleaning Lady (Fox) Episode 2
etc

2

This smart playlist was generated from the dates of “originally aired”. It shrinks automatically as you watch the episodes.
grafik

2 Likes
3

That’s a nice workaround, thanks for sharing, but I still think it would be nice if it could be treated like a multi-series series. I’ll give the Smart Playlist a try, it’s definitely better than what I tried before, but say I didn’t realize Supergirl was in the Arrowverse when I created it, then I wanted to add it. All the Supergirl episodes would be at the bottom, instead of updating to the series. Or what if a special that aired later should come before an earlier episode, it’s not ideal but with a Unified Series I could change it’s air date & it’d move. Plus it would be available to all users, not just the one who created it.

The Playlist option isn’t enough for me to risk the wrath of the Mouse Mafia to find a way to get the Marvel World on Plex. A Unified Series would because it’d be a permanent solution not a single use one

4

No, they wouldn’t. The playlist is automatically sorted by “air date”. The Supergirl episodes started airing during S03 of Arrow. Thus they will appear in the right place.
Same appllkies to any specials. Their position in the list is determined solely by their individual air date.

1 Like
5

Ah. I’ll have to check it out. From my experience I’ve never successfully resorted a playlist after it was created. It’s been a few years since I tried, but I’ll try it again, see if it works

6

That may be because they weren’t editable in the beginning. But now they have the command “Edit Filters” on them, which also allows you to re-set the sorting order.

1 Like
7

So I’d have to reset it if I added it after the fact? That makes more sense

8

No. If you have set it to “aired date (ascending)” right from the start, there is no need to reset it.

9

Wow, that’s definitely different than it was at the beginning of “The Great Quarantine” because I tried a few different ways when I had lots of extra time & nothing worked

10

That was actually always the case with smart playlists. They retain the sort order which was defined when they are created. If later some additional media appear in the library, which fit the filter arguments, then they are automatically integrated – in the pre-defined order.

1 Like
11

So I just tested making it a Smart Collection & I have my collection of the Arrowverse Shows as “DC” I followed the instructions except using Smart Collection instead of Playlist & not having it be only unplayed & it made a Collection that has the episodes in order… awesome… & if you hit Play it will play them in order, awesome… Except when I go down to the episode & try to play one in the middle it opens up the Season & then the next is the next episode of that season… It was close…

12

But if I include the Unplayed filter it works. & it’s accessible to ALL users. & if you edit the Collection, goto Advanced & under Collection Filtering Based On select User Currently Viewing The Content Each user can use it without having to create their own

13

So I just tried something with the DC Series, not that it matters because they don’t crossover the movies & shows, but I was thinking it’d be good for the MCU, I just don’t have all of those movies & don’t have the TV series.
I created a series titled “DC Movies” It’s a series that I will have to manually manage, but adding it to the Smart Collection, with each Movie as an episode with the proper Air Date mixes them into the list fine. I personally have each movie Hardlinked which works because they are in different libraries & means they don’t take up twice the space, but I know some people find Hardlinks scary for some reason. Definitely not a full integration, but using the work around you shared I think it’s a plus

The biggest negative is that it shows everything by the cover of the series in the list instead of the season, I tried making each movie a separate season with the movie poster, but that didn’t work, & having each movie as a separate show is just too much for me personally.

EDIT: I discovered that if the show has no cover then it will show the episode art, but since the episode is normally shown wide the web interface will look dumb, but on the TV It’ll show the poster of the movie. That solves the problem of them all showing DC Movies for the title, if the cover image has the name on it. It comes down to which part is important. If you use the Web UI most then a wide image looks good & shows well in the Web. If you use a TV then you have to suffer the web UI looking like crap,

14

:laughing:

1 Like
15

For your consideration… No response is required…

Feature request… “Watch Order” or “Cross Overs”…

When the Chicago Fire | PD | Med had crossovers - what order should I watch?

Same for Law & Order Original | SVU | Organized Crime…

Probably others…

Sometimes it’s the whole series…

Daredevil Season 1 (Apr 10, 2015)
Jessica Jones Season 1 (Nov 20, 2015)
Daredevil Season 2 (Mar 18, 2016)
Luke Cage Season 1 (Sep 30, 2016)
etc…

Would be nice if Plex provided advice in order to watch…

Thanks.

16

Plex should allow us to create TV Crossover Shows in a list so that the episodes will play in the sequence provided and still allow for full functionality of video playback that is lost when using “work arounds”, and keeps your proper sequence after the crossover list is played.

For instance, let’s assume we have SHOW1, SHOW2, and SHOW3 and they a three show crossover arc: SHOW1 S02E08, SHOW2 S06E07, and SHOW3 S05E07

We should be able to create a list with the following sequence for the crossover episodes:

SHOW3 S05E07
SHOW2 S06E07
SHOW1 S02E08

Now, when someone starts playing SHOW3 and gets to S05E07, since the episode is tagged as part of a crossover arc list, the “next episode” that is shown in the CONTINUED WATCHING and actually played is SHOW2 S06E07. This repeats itself over and over for each item in the CROSSOVER LIST until the list has been completed. Then, when the list is complete, go back to the original series and continue with the next available episode. In the case above that would be SHOW3 S05E08.

If someone is watching a season of the show that’s not first on the crossover list (For instance, SHOW2 S06 in the example above), once you get to the episode on the crossover list, you can either ignore the list outright or have plex ask of you want to start from the beginning of the list to play the full arc…. or you could have a preference to set which one you’d like.

17

Hi i complete this request with mine :

Plex does snot currently allow automatic playlist creation based on a collection to ensure a logical sequence of media. It would be useful to add collection management in implicit playlists so that the player intelligently queues related media.

Requested features:

  • If a user finishes a movie or episode from a collection, Plex should automatically suggest the next one in the collection order.
  • Example:
    • Watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone should be followed by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets without manual intervention.
    • Seamlessly transition between seasons and movies in series where movies fit between seasons (Initial D, Dragon Ball).

This feature would enable smooth and coherent playback of related content without requiring manual input.

And for clarify :
Currently, the implicit playlist only works for series (and probably music), but it does not take collections into account.

Let’s take the example of the Initial D series: seasons 1, 2, 4, and 5 consist of regular episodes, while season 3 is a movie. Both the movie and the series are part of the same collection under the same name.

I would like the implicit playlist to be extended to collections. This would allow continuous playback of videos, whether they are movies or series, within the same collection.

In my example, the ideal scenario would be that when the last episode of season 2 is finished, the next video to play is the movie (season 3), and after the movie ends, the playback continues with the following seasons of the series.

The playlist is already based on the release date, so it would simply be a matter of applying the same principle while also considering collections, regardless of the content type or library.