Guys - it does not matter what it is - it is still a nice to have feature - whether bundled as part of Playlist development or separately - it does not matter.
My thought is that we cannot have client support of smart playlists without first support for 'dumb' playlists since the clients first need to understand playing the next item in sequence automatically.
However, sa2000 is right - ultimately only the Plex Devs know how it's going to work, and as long as they know our wishes, it doesn't really matter how it works on the back-end.
My thought is that we cannot have client support of smart playlists without first support for 'dumb' playlists since the clients first need to understand playing the next item in sequence automatically.
However, sa2000 is right - ultimately only the Plex Devs know how it's going to work, and as long as they know our wishes, it doesn't really matter how it works on the back-end.
Okay back from a shot vacation here....
What you pointed towards was a req. for "dumb" playlists, and can't IMHO be compared to what I suggested....
(And in my book, a dumb playlist is a queue, that you manually add to, and then ask the system to do a playback of)
You then mention "Smart Playlists", but the OP of the thread you pointed towards, did not req. that.
So in my book....I heard about thread hijacking, but this was going into the extreme <_<
When above is said, then maybe a "Smart Playlist" in XBMC is siml. to my req, I have no idea, but instead of just saying to people....Hey Vote here instead, then you could at least have the curticy and say that this is a sub part of that, and then point to a relevant thread
/Tommy
Edit: And was quating one msg from another user, sorry abot that, but was targeting agregjones
My argument is against the proliferation of sections. To me, sections should be very high level: movies, tv shows, concerts. Collections, in my opinion, are a much better fit for dynamic lists based on metadata. I have no problem with 200 collections. 200 sections would be a nightmare to me, likely having severe impacts on some clients each time the top level structure was displayed.
My argument is against the proliferation of sections. To me, sections should be very high level: movies, tv shows, concerts. Collections, in my opinion, are a much better fit for dynamic lists based on metadata. I have no problem with 200 collections. 200 sections would be a nightmare to me, likely having severe impacts on some clients each time the top level structure was displayed.
You can share a section...You can't share a collection
/Tommy
You can share a section...You can't share a collection
/Tommy
I will always put the primary user first. You should be able to share collections under a section. I think it is a bad fit in sections, often there only to overcome other shortcomings (i.e., parental controls).
+1 for this feature!!!!
For example, my wife and I don't YET have a child, but that's not far down the line, and I'd eventually love to have a setup for the kid where he/she can go turn on the TV and have access to all the media that we approve. So maybe we have a tag in our files called "kid-approved" or something like that... And then the little person can browse the library as if it were a full library. Right now I have two libraries: Movies and TV Shows. I'd love to create a "virtual" library that includes some TV shows and some movies, as we approve.
+1 for this feature!!!!
Please press the "Like this" button on the first post in the thread.
Saying +1 doesn't count
/T
Another way of making a virtual library would be to allow the use of one of the main folders in a library. For instance you have:
Movies (library main folder)
Action (categorie subfolder)
Adventures (categorie subfolder)
Comedies (categorie subfolder)
Kids (categorie subfolder)
So all the movies are in their category folder all of those being in the movie folder. I could see a virtual library per folder (category) which will be also dynamic right?
You can also have a library composed of each folder category (bypassing) the movie folder.
I think that as these are already organized movies, it should make it "easy" to create virtual libraries based on the path of the files.
I like this idea. While we wait for the developers I'm gonna see about a work around.
+1 from me.
And I would actually prefer real smart collections vs. playlists. Because a playlist is a playlist, supposed to collect items that should be played together (shuffeled or in a row). A collection would be something that I can browse and have as additional "smart sections" in the Plex UI (which would be shared to my users). I think they are very distinctive features.
We already used to have collections that were showing more prominently in the UI, but it appears most of that functionality has been removed from the system over time. If we could get back those old collections and just enhance them by allowing dynamic filtering/updating, we would be all set.
+1 for me as well. Sounds like exactly what I was looking for a way to do.
Means we can create filtered movie databases for the people who only allowed to watch child friendly stuff,
Mark
+1 for me as well. Sounds like exactly what I was looking for a way to do.
Means we can create filtered movie databases for the people who only allowed to watch child friendly stuff,
Mark
You need to press the like button on the first post for your vote to count
/T
I too would love to see this come to light.
I do something MANUALLY right now in a "hackish" kiind of way. I wanted to create different Libs for season/holidays (Christmas, New Years, Val Day, Memorial Day, etc) with relevant movies. What I resorted to is this directory structure:
F:\SeasonHoliday\Christmas
F:\SeasonHoliday\Easter
F:\SeasonHoliday\Halloween
etc
I then symlink directories with a windows command like the following:
mklink /J "F:\SeasonHoliday\Christmas\A Disney Christmas Gift (1983)" "F:\Movies\A\A Disney Christmas Gift (1983)"
(I keep all symlink commands in a batch file for archive purposes in case I ever need to rebuild)
In this case it creates a directory called "A Disney Christmas Gift (1983)" under Christmas and points it to the real location on my system (last parameter).
I then just create a real movie library ie Christmas pointed to F:\SeasonHoliday\Christmas directory.
This works great EXCEPT that I don't want all the holiday libraries showing all the time. Maybe only 2 at a time (previous/next holiday). This is easy enough to do for shared users as you can just check or uncheck the library for that user BUT as the admin you ALWAYS see ALL LIBRARIES which sucks. You can work around this problem sort of by creating a new normal home user for yourself and only share the active holidays at the time OR
Setup a 2nd server. I did the 2nd. I moved all my music and music videos to this server and have all the season/holiday libs setup here. Now in most of the main clients I use I only select Server1 so I don't see them. I would have just setup and used a 2ndary home user but this conflicts with my use of the xBox as I use Skype on this often and need to be logged in as my "real user". Since Plex doesn't allow quick user change on the xBox but instead uses the logged in user I'm screwed with that approach. The old 2 steps forward, 1 step back routine. :(
But anyway I just wanted to share a work around that can be done now to get "some" of this functionality today.
Carlo
I just had a "senior" moment. Started a new (duplicate) request for basically this exact thread. Ironically I was the last person to post in this thread.
From the other thread I had just created (now locked-as appropriate) I came up with almost the exact criteria that dane22 did here:
Guess good minds thinks similar :)
I must say I'm really surprised this hasn't gotten more votes as it's a great request that could be used in so many ways by different people.
Anyway, thought I'd give this thread a "bump" and share what I had written in case this helps to change anyone's mind and get some more LIKES for this super powerful feature request.
==============================
I would love to have the ability to setup virtual libraries to the existing data we already have.
If designed correctly it could add a lot of new uses to the system. My initial thought is this is strictly server based and requires no changes to any clients (quicker roll out).
In a nut shell a client would see what appears to be a normal library.
On the server side we would have the choice of setting up a "normal" or "virtual" library. The "normal" library is just like what we have currently.
The "virtual" library would have us first select a normal library to work from. (ie your existing movie library).
Next you would enter any filter criteria such as:
Ratings equal to or above
Content Ratings (Or between items) as in "G" or "PG" or "PG13" (must match one if listed)
Search of the following Meta Fields: Writer, Director, Genres, Collections
and the BIG one SHARING tags
So it's nothing but a virtual filter of an existing library. But to a client it would appear as a real library.
Imagine all the cool things you could do with this.
1) Setup a movie lib for PG13 and lower tags. Nice for when you have family/friends over and want to give quick "safe" access to friends
2) Setup virtual library for all your Steven Spielberg or James Cameron films
3) Setup a RECOMMENDED library using the "sharing tag". Want to have a lib with your top 100 recommended movies for friends. Just edit any movie and add "recommended" as a sharing tag and then use this in the filter for the virtual library.
4) etc, the sky is pretty much the limit in how you could use it.
Like this (OP POST) post if you would like to see this type of functionality added to Plex!
Carlo
While no substitute for having it built into Plex I created a method to handle most of this semi-automatically.
https://forums.plex.tv/topic/131308-cayars-setup-walk-through-and-some-tips-and-tricks/?p=927727
Plex desperately needs this! Currently there is no practical way to perform a search in Plex for Roku and searching on the mobile apps is a pain. In addition to the described benefit of creating custom collections this feature could create a way for users to navigate their way through filters, building a search as they go.
If admins can define dynamic custom searches, why not let the users build on the search results themselves and combine them with default search fields such as date or director to narrow down their media view by combining these filters? For example, suppose there is a virtual section containing all of the films in the sci-fi genre. A user browsing to the dynamic Sci-Fi section would then be able to hit a link to search for actors within that group. They could select Sigourney weaver and would see all of the Sci-Fi movies starring Sigourney Weaver. From here, you might select to filter by date and choose the 70's, and find Alien.
Or in a "Horror/Suspense" virtual section that is built dynamically off genre tags, such as Horror, Thriller, Suspense, and Gore, you might see a subsection for just "Horror" (containing just movies specifically tagged as horror) as well as "Comedy", containing comedy/horror films, and "Foreign" for foreign-language horror films. These sections should continue as long as there are movies that match, allowing the user to build a virtual boolean search by graphically adding criteria to limit the results.
In fact, once the user narrows his search down to a group of movies he wants, why not allow him to save this search as a "Personal search" that he could come back to later or share with others. Suppose he navigates to a search result for movies in the Comedy and Horror genres that also star Simon Pegg. Once a new movie is added to the library that matches, it would show up there automatically.
I agree with others who have suggested the name "Virtual dynamic section" can be misleading. "Sections" in Plex currently refer to very broad media categories: TV, Movies, Music, Photos. I think your feature might be better described as a "saved search folder" or "dynamic filter" or something like that.
For anyone interested, I spent a little time and pulled all of the posts related to “Collections” (that I could find) into sort of a summary post with counts. Its pretty interesting to see how many posts there were on the same idea and how popular a lot of them were. Just goes to show how many people are interested in this feature and also on how little attention it seems to be getting from the development team :-/ Maybe by pulling together some stats we might be able to encourage some actual progress?
I have my libraries broken in 3 sections… Kid movies (g, pg, pg13), dad movies (x, nr), and movies ®. It would be nice if I wouldn’t have to physically and manually move them between folders to get this functionality to work.
1 Like
you could use the tags and managed users to do that
