Hi,
There is one category of film which often gives me headaches when trying to organise it in Plex: short films. By short films I mean almost anything that is not feature film or TV series: short experimental, essay and documentary films, music videos, clips, performances etc.
I have more then 500 short films including films by Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Bill Viola, Richard Kern, Michael Snow etc. Almost all of these authors made only short films, a lots of them... and most of them don't have official covers.
So, making separate movie type library for short films is must if I want to avoid mixing hundreds of these titles (as I said most of them without covers and some of them less than 5 minutes in length) with all these classic movies, genre movies with nice covers and fanart you can scrape from movie agents. But I was not really happy with how it looks in separate movie type library, so I started using TV Shows type of library...
First, I had to rename all media files using plex guide for TV shows organizing so TV shows type of library could recognize them. Now I have authors/directors shown as would TV shows would and shorts are shown as episodes. I really like that and it has much more sense. This way while browsing in clients I can directly browse authors (shown as would TV shows would) , I have info about them and list of their films in a way just like you would browse some TV Show. I am much happier with organising short films this way but it has its shortcomings which are not problematic but are inconvenient:
- You have to add metadata all by yourself. You can't scrape episodes separately as movies (as far as I know)
- You can't avoid or change 'Seasons'
- As I have said before you will have to rename media files to be shown in TV Shows
Still, for me, it nicer and still more convenient then using movie type library so I'm sticking with it.
This all led me to think what would really my request for short films had to be to solve this "problems" and at same time to make sense within Plex. I have no solution but would be happy if there could be 'switch' within tv shows type library or separate type of library with similar structure (maybe within Home Videos?) which would allow to title something instead 'Seasons' and possibility of scraping 'episodes'. If somebody has ideas, please...
I really hope I am not alone with this because I find this important for every serious cinema buff who wants to use Plex to organize media.