What is the purpose of plex playlists?

General Discussions
1

I don’t really understand why plex made playlists so overcomplicated.
So when a user wants to add a TV serie to a playlist it starts adding all the current episodes to this playlist instead of a link to the TVSerie (Add for example the simpsoms and you will end up with a list of 1200 items where you cannot see which ones were viewed ).

First of all that makes the playlist completely useless, since it will contains dozens of episodes for each tv show, making the playlist way too long. On top of that you can’t even see which episodes you already watched…and when a new episode has been released it is not added to the playlist, because it is a total static list.

If they just would have added a link to the tv show, then the user would be forwarded to the show intro and he would immediately see what he already watched and what new episodes were added (dynamic versus static list).

So I don’t understand why they made it complicated by making static lists that are not usable (cannot see if it was already watched + new content is not added + becomes overclutted by so many episodes)

As for collections they are not integrated in the GUI, meaning that when I’m watchin a “tv show” front page in plex, I only have an option to add them to a playlist, not to a collection.
I also think that you cannot add stuff to collections when it is not your server.

I wanted this of my chest

2

Playlists are to play specific songs or videos on a specific order, if you want group series or movies you can use collections instead

3

I love the playlists and use it all the time. Example. Six million dollar man/bionic woman…they had crossover episodes. So I arranged them in the order they aired so they play seamlessly in order through the playlist.

Also, I have TV shows where I I don’t like some of the episodes, but I love the series. These are all rewatchable shows to me. So I make a playlist of that show, but only with my favorite episodes. For me, it’s easier to just add the entire show to a playlist, and then go to the playlist and delete the episodes I don’t want on the playlist.

Another positive of a playlist is that it is a workaround for some plex players that time out after 2 or 3 hours of playing…In other words, the auto play doesn’t work…but a playlist will play all the way through without timing out