Something I have struggled with for along time is to somehow pull a random TV show episode and play it before a movie, like what we enjoyed as kids in the theaters in the '60’s and '70’s. I wanted to indicate a folder like “Looney Tunes” and randomly select an episode. I never was able to get it to work but discovered a workaround that is better than nothing.
I ended up building a test file of file paths for a season of Looney Tunes, removing hard paragraph breaks and inserting semicolons between each path, and then pasting that text into the Preroll field under Server-Extras. I don’t like trailers, so I left that unselected. The result is that a random episode now plays before viewing a movie. Yay!
It is not optimal, because there is a hard limit to the number or characters in the Preroll field. I would love to point prerolls to a playlist instead so I don’t have to mess around with changing the text file after what I have in there now becomes repetitious. I’d also like to include a lot more episodes from different shorts like Popeye, Three Stooges, Pink Panther, etc. Now it is limited to 20-30 show episodes/cartoons, but it does work.
Hopefully this workaround helps someone like me who loves a short cartoon before viewing a film. Ultimately, perhaps the Plex development team would consider linking the preroll field to a randomized playlist instead? Thanks!
