I am looking into some restructuring of my Plex libraries and trying to figure the best way to store some artist based video files, rather like Music Videos so currently grouped in artist folders, each of which contains at least one video file.
What would be the best library type to hold these and hopefully display them by artist, much as a Music type library, but without intermediate Album grouping?
Not suitable for TV Show or Photos types, so that leaves Movie or Other Video types as Music is also not suitable due to normally having a deeper structure, but in any case won’t show video files unless there’s an audio file in there somewhere and my requirement is for video only files.
Best naming practices for Movies are covered in support docs, but I can find no mention of what is required for the Other Videos type of library. As far as I recall, the folder structure doesn’t really matter and the files are simply listed by filename, but just a flat list. So the artist names would be lost. I could add the artist name into the filename, but that would only sort them in the displayed list and not group them as in a Music type library.
I could view by folder, but it would be a rather empty display I think as no artwork would be shown? Or would any included artwork files get used?
I’m thinking either Movies or Other Videos could be used, but both would suffer the same problem would they not?
Can anyone suggest the best library type to store such artist related videos?
Have you considered storing them as local extras for the artists in your music library?
This will however only work for artists for which you also have at least 1 song.
Exactly and not necessarily actual music media so don’t want them mixed up in a Music library. I could put them in a dedicated Music type library, but as you know, that requires at least one audio file in there or they won’t show up and these are video only.
All of which means a Music type library is not really suitable.
It does seem as if on so many occasions Plex seem to completely miss the bleeding obvious.
I’m wondering whether the answer is to use a Movie type library as that will use artwork files and then use Collections for Artists. Then just view the library by Collections. That would work, but the trouble is importing new content into Plex. There needs to be a tag that can be set in each file (e.g. ‘Grouping’) so that on import, Plex will use that tag as the collection to assign.
I can set tags in an automated process so that is infinitely preferable to having to manually create and assign each Collection in Plex. But does Plex use any actual tag in such a way?
Thinking more about the need to have at least one audio file in order for Plex to see the video files in a Music type library. Where does that audio file have to be?
Does there have to be one in each actual folder that contains a video file? Or just somewhere within that artist’s content? If the latter, then would an audio file in the artist’s folder allow videos in album subfolders to be seen?
Just wondering if a dummy audio file could be used to allow videos to be seen and where that dummy would need to be.
It also raises the question of what criteria does Plex use to determine if there’s an audio file in a suitable location? Does it simply check the filename extension, or use some other method to determine file type, or even examine it for actual audio content?
In fact, why does Plex have any such restriction. If Music type library could deal with videos in a normal music content folder structure, that would fulfil a gap in Plex’s armoury and provide for the use of video storage grouped by Artist and then Album, with those tags being used to organise the library however desired. Currently there’s flat list of Videos/Movies or series/episode based TV and nothing in between.
Better even would be to introduce a new library type that could be video only but with the aforementioned grouping abilities. Either that or simply extend the capabilities of the ‘Other Videos’ type library. Perhaps a checkbox in the library configuration to ‘Group by Folder’ or ‘Flat’ (as it is now).
