Video tutorials organisation.

[Serhioromano]

I do not have much of video and no TV Shows at all. I rarely watch videos. No time. But I whatcha lot of video tutorials. And I have big collection of them. Those are series of totorials. Sometimes it si simple.

CSS3
-- 01. Introduction.wmv
-- 02. Understanding selectors.wmv
-- 03. Rules.wmv

Or sometimes it is something like this

Angular
-- Angular best Practice
-- -- 01. Organize your code
-- -- -- 01. Introduction.avi
-- -- -- 02. Naming.avi
-- -- 02. Scopes
-- -- -- 01. Introduction.avi
-- -- -- 02. batarang.avi
-- Shaping up Angular
-- -- Level 1 - Service
-- -- -- 01. Factories.avi
-- -- -- 02. values.avi
-- -- Level 2 - Forms
-- -- -- 1. Forms and models.avi
-- -- -- 2. Validation.avi

Actually I think my structure is well organized. And now only way is to add library with all tutorials and use Group by folders view.

 

But what would be perfect is to have a special media type. SO after it is analysed we have courses series. We have tags also. For example we have directory like this.

video
-- Final cut
-- Motion 5
Development
-- Javascript
-- -- Angular
-- -- Backbone
-- PHP
-- -- Laravel
-- HTML

this is structure of the categories. Inside already video series folders. So those folders turned into tags.  I have 5 video courses under Angular for example. So if I click this tag, all of them come up. But if i click Javascript all series from angular and backbone will come up.

 

And as i mentioned there are two types of video series. One is plain like CSS example. It is folder wil list of videos. And other hase another level of folders. And this is the way to show. When I open series I either see list of videos or list of sub folders.
 

Although I can use it even now. But it would be so much convenience that plex may be used not only by people for fun, but by people like me who mostly use hos Mac for work and what bring benefits of using Plex during the work and education process. 

[WOLF8AUER]

I have a different approach for organising tutorials and educational material. I really don’t want to be forced to change the structure of the video course. Therefore I’ve tried to figure out what plex can do out of the box to display educational content as clear and organised as possible.
I use the “TV shows” library for that.
Here are my 3 steps:

1. Change video format to .mp4. Wherever possible it should only remultiplex (change the container), without re-encoding the videos. (e.g. .avi → .mp4)
2. Write the file name of the video to the mp4 title tag (metadata).
3. Add "s01e01 - " scheme to the file name.

For the courses laid out in the thread it would look like this:

CSS3
-- s01e01 - 01. Introduction.mp4
-- s01e02 - 02. Understanding selectors.mp4
-- s01e03 - 03. Rules.mp4

Angular
-- Angular best Practice
-- -- 01. Organize your code
-- -- -- s01e01 - 01. Introduction.mp4
-- -- -- s01e02 - 02. Naming.mp4
-- -- 02. Scopes
-- -- -- s02e01 - 01. Introduction.mp4
-- -- -- s02e02 - 02. batarang.mp4
-- Shaping up Angular
-- -- Level 1 - Service
-- -- -- s03e01 - 01. Factories.mp4
-- -- -- s03e02 - 02. values.mp4
-- -- Level 2 - Forms
-- -- -- s04e01 - 1. Forms and models.mp4
-- -- -- s04e02 - 2. Validation.mp4

Notice that I am only adding to the file name. I do not delete anything. This is quick, easy and could even easily bee reversed.

I don’t want to display the content by folder because depending on the folder structure of the course this can be messy.
With the "s01e01 - " scheme however you can display your content by “TV shows”.

The drawback of the “TV shows” library is that it only displays “Episode x” for the video title if the agent can’t find your “show” in “tvdb”.
Therefore I use the .mp4 container which can hold metadata. If plex finds a title tag in an .mp4 file, it displays it. (Unfortunately metadata from .mkv is not recognized by plex.)

I’ve written bash scripts for 1) and 2) to automate the process. For 3) I use a file renaming app.
Since I use ffmpeg for transmuxing and exiftool for writing metadata my solution is pretty portable. Furthermore there should be powerful renaming apps for all mayor platforms.

Tutorials are displayed like TV shows. Even with cover art. Simply add a “poster.jpg” image to the folder.

Videos are organised in sequence. The .mp4 title tag is displayed as the movie title.

What I like is that I can use the next button to navigate to the next video. This is sometimes not possible when using other library types like “movies”.