Hi there,
Very recently a favorite YouTube channel of mine had layed off their entire staff and will no longer be operating. I decided to download all their videos and archive them on Plex. I’ve added them to a brand new “Other videos” Library and have added the thumbnail’s from the YouTube channel as the poster.
In my library, all the videos will appear in the dimensions of a typical dvd box cover. so the wider youtube box thumbnail is cut off – however, when I look at the collections tab, all the video dimensions are instead similar to the desired more wide dimensions.
How do I get the videos to appear in the library this way? Note, I have other libraries which I would like to remain dvd box dimensions
You have created an “other videos”-type of library, right?
There is unfortunately no way in the web app to switch away from the Poster-style thumbnails.
However, the type of content you have in there is IMHO better suited for a “tv show”-type of library.
And as you know, tv episodes do have the landscape thumbnails you are after.
Of course this means you have to start from scratch. Rename the files to conform to the Plex naming guide for TV shows.
Unfortunately, only the first season of CH is listed on TheTVDB, so you will have to find all the descriptions and the order of the episodes yourself and bring them into Plex.
Here is my recommendation how to do that:
The files should already be in mp4/m4v Containers, which enables you to embed both
the title of the video
a short description
the original release date
the thumbnail poster
as embedded meta tags into the files themselves. This is much safer than typing them into the Plex user interface, because that way they will survive a library crash and/or a server rebuild.
You can use mp3tag on Windows
and Meta-Z on Mac for instance
to embed the metatags.
Plex will grab the metadata from the files and show them in its library.
Hmm, so creating a new “TV” library does display each individual episode in the landscape layout, so now I’m wondering how the best way to go about this is, in a way that doesn’t involve investigating each release date, and entering in metadata on each file.
The files I copied from youtube could come as MP4 but Plex wasn’t able to play them, so I instead had to use Jdownloader to rip down a MKV, and thumbnail instead. The files I downloaded ended up having no metadata.
Have you any experience with adding images to wherever Plex gets metadata from? If I were to go to each episode in IMDB and add the thumbnail on there — would Plex then gather that image from IMDB?
No, Plex doesn’t get posters from IMDb directly. They are probably from movieposterdb or somesuch.
You could create entries for the missing seasons at TheTVDB website, including posters.
Or you could create the same at Themoviedb.org (provided they even allow webshows, I haven’t studied their recent rules.)
TheTVDB have their own rules, which can get rather strict. You may want to read them before investing any serious amounts of work there.
Or they may scrap them with a single click.
