Like other Plex users, I’ve painstakingly collected, enhanced and improved thousands of video files over time. For me, it’s music videos from the 80s-90s. And I’d like the ability to watch music videos stored in my collection the same way music is played in Plex - namely that the next music video in the queue starts playing at the beginning of the video - not at the last place the music video was viewed a yesterday, last month or a year, 2 years ago.
The switch for this behavior already exists in Plex - and is called ‘Store Track Progress.’ But it only exists in Music Libraries, not Video Libraries (see below).
Adding this Music Library feature to Video Libraries would provide control for the media collectors whether Plex ‘forgets’ track progress so all music videos can start at the beginning of the track - just like Plex music does today.
Without this feature, every time a music video is skipped before it ends, the video will restart in the middle or the end next time it is played. For movies and family video libraries, this behavior makes sense - you want restart at the last stopped position. For music-based files (like MP3s, FLAC, WAV) and music videos (MPG, VOB, MP4, MKV, etc.) it doesn’t.
The problem compounds over time as more and more music videos have been skipped. Eventually, you can’t start any music video at the beginning since they all start midway or near the end every time.
As a workaround, I’ve tried to mark all music videos as “Mark As Unplayed” - but there’s no Select All feature to do this across thousands of files at once. I’ve attempted to reverse engineer the “Store Track Progress” functionality via hacked code to no avail. I’m attempting to write a script to alter the Plex DB contents to erase the track progress for all music videos on a regular basis - none of which are good or supported options.
If the “Store Track Progress” feature from Music Libraries could be added to Video Libraries (and enabled by default for all users), those collectors of music videos could ‘watch’ music videos the way MTV, VH1 played videos - and how everyone listens to their music. An alternative workaround would be a ‘select all’ feature that allows me to mark all selected library content as ‘Unplayed’ would work too.
Thanks, Plex. And keep up the great work!
