I know that we will never get menu support in DVD/BluRay ISOs and the logic is sound, there’s no good way for plex to provide a consistent ISO menu experience, never mind any menu experience.
With that said, all of these container formats still have internal playlists that they play (BR is pretty explicit with its PLAYLIST/*.mpls files). To me, what would be of extreme value would be able to provide a metadata file that associates a display name with a playlist and have plex simply show the display name and play the associated playlist if selected.
Why don’t I just remux all my media? Because 1) there’s a huge amount of it, and remuxing takes time 2) I like keeping it in the original format as I don’t just play things with plex. perhaps you’d argue I should just play everything through plex, but I have media streamers (like the Dune) and I like to keep my media in the format it cam in.
What value would you get from having a playlist of all the parts of a movie sliced into a huge amount of individual files?
I understand why the Blu-Ray format handles it this way… those are mostly technical reasons. Maybe I’m a little thick or biased but I don’t see the value add for media playback… hence seriously curious.
Sidenote… remuxing means you actually do keep the original content/quality – except you can opt to drop certain audio tracks / subtitles.
lack of ISO support kept me from plex for years and years.
less for blurays, but moreso for my years and years of dvd archives in ISO format, complete with menus and the extra content.
lack of plex ISO support, along with lack of good support and easy EU use for separate additional content, was a tough pill to swallow when I did finally migrate to plex.
On most blu-rays, a single playlist corresponds to the main movie (or on say a disney movie with animated text, might have multiple playlists with the animated text translated into different languages using seamless branching), another playlist might correspond to all the deleted scenes with another set of playlists being each individual deleted scene…
If I could create some metadata file that says I care about playlists X,Y,Z and these are the titles I give to them (and plex can ignore the rest), it makes ISOs basically fully usable (however, with some end user work).
i.e. I don’t want want plex to parse the playlist and show me the individual parts, I want it to treat the playlist itself as individual movies that it indexes (with the ability to basically have plex focus on just the playlists it cares about).
For BluRay this should be simple (i.e. almost any media player today can play the mpls file directly). I’m not sure how this would work with DVDs, but I’d assume its possible as well.
