Plex playlist not showing

In past years I went back and forth between Plex and Emby as my media server of choice but eventually settled on the former since I switched my server from my desktop PC to an Nvidia Shield, then to a Docker container in a Synology NAS. Its very easy to get started with Plex, but as you add different types of content and grow your libraries, it becomes more and more complicated to keep everything tidy and easy to use. I have 150TB+ in Plex organized in a dozen different libraries, learned a lot along the way, and will share my notes in this entry.

As a caveat, this post is not about streaming or transcoding, Im using Plex in Direct Play on my LAN and do not care about serving low-quality transcodes to the entire neighborhood as some people seem keen to do. [Im not judging, its just that Im not interested nor experienced with this use case].

The ways we are interacting with a tutorial, audiobook, movie, or TV series are all very different, and it takes work to bend Plex to be a good fit with all these scenarios. If you have to take anything from this post, its that each type of content needs its own library with an approach thats finetuned to it.

As much as I try to use automation and rely on Plexs native features, to achieve the best results be prepared for some grunt work to get more obscure content organized neatly and in line with how its meant to be consumed.

I try to steer away as much as possible from organizing or tagging content via the Plex UI, as that metadata wont survive if you have to rebuild a library from scratch, which over the years is likely to happen eventually. Instead, metadata is best conveyed via 1] your folder/file organization and naming conventions, 2] by metatagging source files themselves, and/or 3] with helper text/json/xml files to be parsed by Plex agents or scripts. But theres some genre and collection metadata that has to be input via the Plex UI.

If youre not willing to make that effort, well, garbage in garbage out, youll get out of your libraries what you put into them. And the more content you add, the more youll need it to be organized or the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.

1. Matching Recalcitrant Documentaries, TV Shows, Movies, Sports etc.

Provided you apply the recommended naming conventions [TV, movies], Plex is usually good at auto-matching and fetching the right metadata, especially since the new movie scanner and agent were introduced with PMS 1.20. However, some content types can be tricky and tiny punctuation variations can throw the agents off [e.g. you cant put colons in Windows file names], as well as titles in other languages than English. Follow these guidelines to save you a lot of grief, depending on the type of content you plan to collect.

1.1. Documentaries Are Not All the Same, Or Are They?

Documentaries cant be all dumped in the same library. Instead, make sure to put standalones [e.g. Tropicália] in a Movie library while series [e.g. Chefs Table] should be in a separate TV library. Some are tricky as you may think theyre standalones but theyre actually part of an extended TV series of sorts [e.g. content from National Geographic]. Look up these loose ends in TheTVDB and IMDB TMDB then decide whether to put them in your TV or Movie documentary libraries accordingly [edit: someone pointed out I made a mistake, it looks like IMDB is used by Plex just for ratings, like Rotten Tomatoes].

After I initially posted this entry someone brought Colima to my attention. I think Ill stick to my approach, but its good to have options:

Combined Library Metadata Agent [Colima] in combination withAbsolute Series Scanner [ASS]allows you to have movies and tv shows within the same library, something that Plex sadly not supports out of the box. Common scenarios to use this agent for are documentaries, western and Japanese animation libraries.

Colima.bundle README.md

1.2. TV Shows & Movies: Its All About Matching Whats in Meta Databases

To automatically enforce Plexs naming convention on TV shows, use a tool such as Sonarr, Filebot, TV Rename, or Rename My TV Series. TV shows should match in most cases if theyre properly named, but in the rare case that they wont, find the offending series in TheTVDB then force a match by ID. With the new Plex TV Series agent, you might need to append thetvdb- to the ID.

You can do the same ID matching with IDs from TMDB in movie libraries. Movie libraries also work for stand-up comedy shows, which I chose to set up a separate library because for me its a different mood, time commitment, and audience than watching a regular movie. This is why I also have a separate library for family movies but from a technical perspective you dont have to use separate libraries in these cases, its more of a convenience. [I made that structural choice before the addition of Smart Collections, which we cover later in this post].

1.3. Sport Events

Your mileage may vary with sports depending on whether individual events can be found in Tmdb or TheTVDB. UFC fights for instance are recognized if you set them in a movie library. Heres a reddit thread discussing successfully handling Formula 1 seasons and heres a thread about NBA/NFL, a similar approach may or may not work for your sport of choice depending on how mainstream it is.

1.4. Anime, Music Videos, and Other Miscellaneous Content Types That People Somehow Want in Plex

Its impossible for me to track all the ways people use Plex, as there are many niches I have no interest in. Some people want to handle family videos, travel pictures, radio shows, podcasts, ebooks, comics, movie trailers, etc., including things that I think are much better handled by other dedicated content servers such as Calibre Web or Komga. Theres a whole subreddit and website just for preroll videos!

For Anime I use a regular TV Shows library but then I have a tiny library, if its something youre more serious about there an agent called HAMA.

For long music videos I use a Movie library, this works well for most operas and concerts. If you want to collect short MTV-style music videos, your guess is as good as mine, possibly look into the Shorts section later in this entry.

2. Getting the Best Experience for Tutorials: Use mp4 Tagging or a Custom Agent

Multi-part video tutorials is the content type I found most tricky to handle, as the big public databases dont have metadata about them. There are two main approaches to this challenge, each with their pros and cons. Again, you want to refrain from doing a lot of work via the Plex UI as youd have to redo it all over again in case you need to rebuild your library for whatever reason. With computers, nothing is permanent so plan accordingly.

2.1. The Embedded Metatag Approach

A first round of trial and error led me to using collections with the following settings:

• Library type: Movies. If you use Other Videos youll have to merge video parts manually in Plex, which would need to be redone if you ever have to reset said library, which in my experience is bound to happen.
• Scanner: Plex Movie Scanner.
• Agent: Plex Movie [legacy].
• Hide items belonging to collections [stacked content is based on Collections].
• Rename files with a tool such as Flash Renamer, following the - partx.ext convention.
• Group parts of the same tutorial under the same album, by tagging files with mp3tag. This works on mp4 video files so if you have AVIs or MKVs youll want to convert them with VLC or Handbrake first.
• For categorization I dont use tags, which never got any love in the Plex UI, but rather self-defined genres.
• You can add specific artwork for each video segment [i.e. if you have different files within the same tutorial], which will make it easier to pick the right one among the 20 parts of a long tutorial. Some media players such as mpv make it very easy to save screenshots in one keyboard shortcut.
• You might need to generate your own posters as tutorials about underwater archery or Roblox origami are not necessarily going to come with something good looking for Plex purposes. The expected aspect ratio is 1:1.5.

This turned to be a manageable but not entirely satisfying workflow in the backend, and the end result in the frontend is a decent but not optimal user experience since navigating a large library will mostly have to be done via the Collections tab. There must be a better way!

2.2. The Agent Approach with Helper Metadata Files

As an alternative, a neater organization may be obtained by following the TV show/season convention, and even more control can be supplied by custom agents. Its a shame that Plex stubbornly lacks support for long-established .nfo files, but people have been complaining about it for years to no avail so Im not holding my breath. I tested four options and have adopted one that ended up being as close to my ideal requirements as its going to get.

• Personal Shows Metadata Agent this is the best option I found for tutorials. Its meta.json format supports genre tags, studio, and cast, but it could be more thorough as there was initially no support for some fields such as collections, tagline, or originally available date I edited the Python source code to add these fields, a tweak that the author then officially added to his repository. If youre willing to do the legwork to conform to the TV show structure and naming convention required by this agent, then the result is very satisfying.
• Extended Personal Media Shows Agent [forum thread]. Like the previous one, it unfortunately doesnt leverage agents that harvest mp4 tags and theres no way to set cast [actors/directors], Genre, or Studio. This agent relies on following a specific naming convention with optional .summary and .metadata files.
• XBMCnfoTVImporter This plugin is meant recognize the type of nfo files used by Kodi, but documentation is nonexistent so while this is probably a good option, prepare to fumble in the dark.
• AvalonXmlAgent inspired by XBMCnfoTVImporter, but with a different XML file format. Looks good but doesnt handle season titles. My first attempt with it didnt work too well though, I think Ill stick to the Personal Shows Metadata Agent.
• Local Assets-Metadata Double Agent [forum thread] similar in spirit to the above but with the added twist of letting you save Plex Metadata locally [i.e. it does import/export].

The agent-based approach is also what Id recommend in case you want to organize your own home photos or videos. For photos theres an autotagging option but its calling a third-party service which you may not want to do for privacy reasons you need Plex Pass to be able to use it, and its reportedly no match with Google Photoss face recognition.

For the best result with custom cast members, save square .jpg pictures of close-up mugshots in a dedicated web folder. Common cloud services such as Google Drive or OneDrive make this way too hard for some reason, I serve these images via a local web server on one of my Synology NASes.

3. Audiobooks: One of the Most Challenging Use Cases with Intricate Solutions

Dedicated support for audiobooks is one of the top open feature requests but so far, they still require that you jump through similar hoops as tutorials for the most part, except as a Music library and using a special-purpose agent. The main drawbacks of using Plex for audiobooks are that:

• On the frontend side, the official Plex clients are not the best to keep track of progress time across devices and other UX niceties specific to listening to audiobooks.
• On the backend side, Plex doesnt provide an agent/scanner combo for audiobooks like theyre doing for TV shows or movies.

For details on the intricate workflows necessary to get the best outcome, see:

• Audiobook Guide 1 macr0dev
• Audiobook Guide 2 Seanap more recent than the previous one, among differences it now leverages the new audnexus data aggregation API via this agent.
• Play audiobooks outside of Audible on Alexa devices
• Alternative approach for multipart audiobooks using mp4s in a Shows library.

To listen to audiobooks on mobile devices, check out:

• Chronicle Audiobook Player for Plex Android only, decent option.
• Prologue I hear good things about it but I wouldnt know firsthand as iOS only
• Bookcamp: app for iOS and Android with Plex backend support, its in early access as of the end of 2021 and looks slick. Its a paid subscription. I havent been able to get it to find my audiobook library even though my Plex server is accessible from the outside and I successfully linked the app to my Plex account.

A significant limitation of audio libraries is that unlike Movies and Shows they dont support collections.

4. Movies with Commentary; Collections by Genre and Audience; Shorts; The Elusive Playback Speed

4.1. Commentary Tracks is Finally a Solved Problem Thanks to a Powerful Python Script

Theres no built-in way to tell apart movies with a commentary track at the library level because the audio stream metadata is not leveraged for navigation. Some people use MKVToolNix or ffmpeg [using ISO codes] to set the commentary soundtrack to a rare language such as Icelandic, while others suggest Tautulli but that seems clunky at best. Alternatively, you could use sharing labels, which require Plex Pass, or create a Commentary tag within Genres or Collections. I elected to do the latter, but didnt want to maintain it manually through the Plex UI, so for a long time was stuck without an acceptable solution.

That changed in March 2021 the author of Plex-Meta-Manager [more on that tool further below] added support for filtering by audio_track_title at my request, which takes care of the commentary track. In your Movies.yml metadata file, have a section like this [be careful with indentation as the dastardly YAML language is looking for excuses to fail]:

collections: Movies with Commentary: plex_all: true filters: audio_track_title: Commentary sync_mode: sync collection_order: release summary: Movies with commentary audio tracks from the director or critics.

If you wanted to create collections by audio track codec [AC3, DTS etc.] as someone asked in the comments below, this is also the way to go.

4.2. Use Smart Collections to Dynamically Categorize Content According to Search Filters

For all the metadata exposed by the Plex search user interface, you dont need the aforementioned script. Simply configure an advanced search and save it as a smart collection, a feature added in April 2021 that was a great improvement to Plex.

Ive used smart collections to categorize documentaries by genre: Arts, Music, History, Nature, Science, etc.

Smart Collections will automatically add new content matching their criteriaI have hundreds of documentaries so I wanted to be able to browse them by theme

4.3. Manual collections Are An Effective Way to Handle Different Audiences Within the Same Account

I also set up collections manually [i.e. not based on filters] by audience, i.e. content for the entire family, that only my wife watches [mystery and police procedural galore!], that I watch together with her, or that we watch with our daughter but our son is not interested in. That way, depending on whos in the mood to watch a TV episode or movie, we can narrow the selection down to that specific audience. And my wife can start watching new shows I downloaded for her without accidentally watching something I intended to watch too. I already have enough libraries as it is without creating libraries by genre or audience!

4.4. Short Movies Are a Conundrum

I havent started collecting shorts yet, but knowing myself, Ill probably get into it at some point. The main challenge is that you might have hundreds or thousands of shorts if you get into collecting old cartoons, and youre likely not to like overwhelming your regular TV or Movies libraries with them. My initial research led to this thread and others like it and led me to believe that the main approaches are:

• Use a TV library, as some shorts [mostly cartoons such as Pixar shorts] are in TheTVDB
• Use a movie library for those shorts that are in TheMovieDB
• Use manual collections
• Use smart collections based on Genre = Short

4.5. Playback Speed: Only on Devices That Support Browser Extensions

Playback speed, while not strictly about library management per se, is something that people often want to control for audiobooks and tutorials, and to a lesser extent sports, but despite popular demand its still not found in any Plex clients. Theres a third-party Chrome extension which means it also works in Edge Chromium but that obviously wont work from your TV or tablet app.

If you must have playback speed control in mobile devices then youre better off using Emby, at least for the library for which you have that need.

5. Adding Chapters to Make Long Videos Easier to Navigate Around

Some long tutorials can be cumbersome to navigate, while other types of content, from sport events to concerts may also benefit from having delineated chapters. If youre ripping DVDs or BluRays, ChapterGrabber will help you get chapter information from the source, and theres also the ChapterDB archive for [some] movies.

When chapter information is not already available, you can add your own chapter information within videos with software such as Handbrake or Drax. In any case this needs to be done in the video files before importing them into Plex.

The power user approach to this task relies on ffmpeg, best combined with a helper script so that you can write a simple text file listing your chapters then writing them back to the videos metadata. The python dependency makes this overkill if you have just a few videos to chapterize, but who doesnt like to spend 5 hours to automate a 15-minute manual job anyway? If like me youre running on Windows, make sure to save your chapters.txt file with Unix end of line characters [LF], which is easy with Notepad++, otherwise youll end up with ugly rectangles at the end of each chapters title. Heres a recap of the procedure tweaked to my own preferences, I do at least a few at a time to get into the groove of things:

While you can set art for seasons and episodes, thumbnails for chapters cant be set manually with local images, theyre automatically generated by Plex based on each chapters exact timestamp [related thread]. Meaning that youll have to tweak your chapter timestamps almost by the exact frame to get the best results. Well, thats not entirely true, you could edit the files generated by Plex in the Media folder in the backend, as explained by Noel Plum in the comments below. Hes been doing it for months without issue, but theres no telling whether future changes in the PMS code wont mess with that eventually.

With MediaInfo GUI you can quickly check whether any given video file already has chapters, and export that list to a text file. You may want to do so in order to edit it and reload it back to its video source in case the existing timestamps dont quite work for you [e.g. bad preview thumbnails], or to remove or add to the list. The equivalent with the MediaInfo CLI is:

mediainfo.exe input.mp4 > metadata.txt

The output will need to be cleaned up and reformatted a bit if you want to reinject it as per Kyke Howells helper script mentioned above, but its not too bad. Alternatively you can use ffmpeg to extract that metadata as also shown by Kyle, with the major inconvenience that timestamps are shown as an integer based on a timebase, or you could use mp4box from the command line, which will generate a ttxt XML file [which then needs to be scrubbed] with hh:mm:ss timestamps [thats the good part]:

mp4box.exe "FilePath" -dump-chap >chapters.ttxt

If need be, you can also scrub existing metadata and chapters with ffmpeg.

Also, it seems you cant force the generation of chapter thumbnails so youll have to wait for your scheduled process to kick in. Once theyre rendered, heres what that looks like in the web UI [according to what I read chapter support varies among Plex clients]:

This guy is a fountain of grappling knowledge, but also talks slowly and repeats himself constantly. Trust me, you want to chapterize him!

6. Misc Library Customization & Management Tips

• If you want your library to look ultra clean, consider using custom posters and fanart such as those found on The Poster Database. Ive used this for my thematic collections but for individual movies Im waiting for that site to add a Plex agent and direct integration into the Poster tab shown when you edit an item. Some people even go through the trouble of customizing episode cards, among other reasons to avoid spoilers [what, this character in the thumbnail died two seasons ago?!]
• For music, some people are raving about Plexamp, I havent used it. Im not currently handling music albums in Plex, Im sure this would turn into a whole chapter in its own right.
• Youll probably want to customize which libraries are part of global search and featured in dashboards, i.e. On Deck and Recently Added. Thats done in the Advanced Settings of each library.

Collections Automatically Created with a Script, Looking Good with Custom Posters

7. Library Organization Wrap-Up: Be Deliberate & Organized

As a summary, to get your content properly organized with the minimum amount of friction, its essential that you:

• Choose the right library media type for your content, which can sometimes be counter intuitive. This means your source content needs to be properly organized, and you cant drop everything in one morass of a Plex library.
• Organize your content by type and follow the official naming conventions for your source folders and files.
• Figure out whether readily available scanners and agents will do the job, or if you have to handle metadata yourself. Theres for instance an agent to handle Youtube downloads.
• Set up each librarys advanced settings deliberately as some of the defaults can have big consequences. This is best done when you first set up your library, though that can be edited later.
• Use collections within and across libraries for TV remote-friendly access to categorized content.
• Summary of the summary: RTFM, theres more to Plex than first meets the eye and its well worth understanding whats going on beneath the hood.

8. Choosing What to Watch Next with Trakt, Moviewatch

8.1. Keep Track of Watch Status and Wishlists with Trakt Integration

One of the primary criteria to choose something to watch is to filter out content youve already watched. Plex does keep track of that, but if you ever have to reset your library, that status is gone. Do you want to manually recheck hundreds of series and movies? If not, Trakt.tv gives you a way to effectively back up your watched status to a third-party service, as well as help you discover other content you might like. Theres built-in scrobber integration between Plex Pass and Trakt VIP, but thats two subscriptions you need to keep paying. If you have a bunch of distinct Plex and Trakt users, thats the way to go.

In my case, I just have one master Plex account and one Trakt account, so heres what I ended up doing to get the most out of the Plex-Trakt combo:

1. Install the Trakt.tv [for Plex] plugin via the Applications section of the Unofficial App Store [UAS] in Web.Tools. Contrarily to popular belief, Plex plugins are not entirely dead, Ill get back to that in a minute.
2. Install Kitana.
3. Do an initial full sync via Kitana [unless your Trakt account is brand new]. Now Plex and Trakt should agree with each other on what youve already watched then stay that way as you watch new content.
4. Create private watchlists in Trakt to add interesting TV shows and movies as Im browsing that site.
5. Connect these watchlists to Sonarr v3 and Radarr to automate their downloading.
   • I found that I had to nudge Sonarr into processing a new list which is easy enough via its API.
   • Radarr will only handle your watchlist via the Trakt User list option, Trakt List wont work for some reason.
6. With the Web to Plex browser extension youll see whether you have a movie/show in your server while browsing Trakt or Imdb.

Find out more about the *arr automation apps in this post. To do the above prior to Sonarr/Radarr v3 you had to use Traktarr.

In summary:

• Content watched in Plex will automatically be marked as watched in Trakt.
• Whenever you watch something outside of Plex, just flag it in Trakt and Plex will know.
• Trakt watchlists are a good way to funnel content back into your Plex libraries if youre willing to set up the *arr infrastructure [again see my NAS entry, this is such a powerful stack].

A side benefit is that I was able to resync my Plex and Trakt accounts that had grown out of sync.

The only thing that I was able to do via Kodi that I cant do in Plex itself is the ability to rate content right after I watched it in the media player. Looks like thats not possible via a Plex plugin.

8.2. Make Movie Night Fun Again with Moviewatch

A common refrain from people with large libraries is that it takes them forever to find something to watch as theyre overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choice they have. You can play with filters to narrow down options, but a very first-world solution to this first-world problem is Moviewatch, which gives you and your co-watchers a Tinder-like interface to swap through movie posters until theres an agreement from all parties, at which point youre one click away from launching the consensus movie in Plex.

9. Managing & Extending Plex Beyond the UI: Plugins, Maintenance, Data Analysis

9.1. Plugins: Unsupported But Not Dead

While plugins such as Web.Tools are no longer supported in the Plex UI, they still work in practice. As I just mentioned, one big piece of functionality they allow is free bidirectional integration with Trakt.

As a complement, Kitana provides a web frontend to these plugins [how to install Kitana via Portainer] which comes handy in some cases.

Plex data in Power BI two of my favorite things together!

A low-tech alternative is to use ExportTools to generate a CSV.

Finally, many people use Tautulli to monitor their Plex server [I do so via a Docker container on my Synology NAS], though its focused more on analyzing viewership than library content.

10. Related Entries

• Getting the Most Out of Your Synology Networked Attached Storage: Did You Know It Can Do That? Youll learn how to run Plex and its friends [Sonarr, Radarr, Overseerr, Tautulli, etc.] in Docker and much more.
• Things I Found Out the Hard Way to Get the Most of the Nvidia Shield. The Shield is an excellent Plex player and a decent entry-level Plex server.

I started a thread on Reddit mentioning this post, lots of good feedback in there that I reflected above through many iterative edits.