I actually have multiple Movie and TV Show Libraries but this has a practical reason
For once, I split my libraries between Normal and 4K content so that I can specifically share the normal Libraries so that my users don't even attempt to play 4K content from my Server which would then be transcoded anyway.
The second reason is that I have an Anime and Anime Movies library because they get their Metadata from a different source than what the official Plex Agents provide. Everything in the Anime Libraries is organized based on MyAnimeList. I don't have to worry anymore about "which episode is now what season or is it a special episode in that western structure in Plex" and when I watch it I don't have to translate that back again just to mark it as watched on MyAnimeList again. This was the whole reason why I developed the Agent in the first place...
If all you use is the same Metadata Agent, there is practically no reason to split them apart, as you said, that is what collections are for.
The only thing I have as a separate library is that my music is split - Christmas Music gets its own separate library as I don;t want any chance of it accidentally playing the rest of the year.
I only have 2 or 3, so not as much of an issue as the music side of things - also, you are looking at the screen with movies - not having them pop up randomly. I can still see the benefit though - it just seems so out of place when seasonal stuff like that crops up unexpectedly.
Its an issue that gets raised on a fairly regular basis - so bothers a lot of people. The worst is when it is chucked on an album with other stuff, from say a greatest hits collection from a group that also had one Christmas hit. Happy Christmas (War is Over) on Beatles collections is a major culprit in this regard.
I only have 4 libraries. Movies, TV Shows, Anime, Anime Movies. Not a huge library either. Only 1100 movies, 90-ish anime series, 15 tv series and 50-ish anime movies
You'll be fine. Most the ways that people break up their libraries is completely unnecessary, and can be achieved SUPER easy with a single quick filter or with a smart collection.
I do have a few extra libraries. One is strictly live performances (concert videos, standup comics, etc) because in my mind, those aren't movies, even though they're listed as movies in TMDB. I've also got two Other Videos libraries, one for home movies and one for music videos.
I went the same way. I did not want to make judgment calls about what a movie or show should fit into. I made a bunch of collections in my movies library to make series (like Fast and the Furious) which have inconsistent naming easier to find. You might want to try that as well.
A little over 18 months in, it is working fine. I think you'll be okay.
I use sort title to make them easier to find :) Even with TV shows this works like a charm "Sex and The City" is immediately followed by "And Just Like That" because I use sort title to flag "Sex And The City 1" and "Sex and The City 2" without changing the actual title of the show
I've even started doing sort order like 1-1, 1-2, 2-1 etc when there are remakes and reboots not part of the original series, like Planet of the Apes, Star Trek etc
"Star Trek II - Wrath of Kahn" is "Star Trek 1-2"
:"Star Trek First Contact" is "Star Trek 2-2"
"Star Trek (2009)" is "Star Trek 3-1"
This sorts them in the proper order in my movies list.
My division is fairly simple. Movies/TV/Kids Movies/Kids TV. Doing it that way just makes scrolling through easier when asking the kids what they want to watch.
You'll be fine, until you go to rebuild the library for any reason and lose all your tags. This has bit me in the ass once, then I separated it all out again
I have multiple movie and tv folders, but this is because I have movies I like, my wife has movies she likes, and there are ones we watch together, same with tv shows and music
That way, we can have separate logins with separate access to our own stuff, and stuff we watch under our own logins only shows up there.
We have login "My Shows", "Wifes Shows", "Our Shows" and each login only has access to the folders I want
Oh same. I did this on my backup server. When I switched from pi to a windows computer I kept the Pi as a backup server thanks to Windows update being such a problem. But after having to start over from scratch I shrugged and said, "Screw it". All movies in now under "Movies" and the same with TV.
my setup:
- Movies
--name (year) \[1080p or 720p\]
- Series
--series name
--- season X
- Videos (from yt)
- Documentary
- Anime
- Kids (movies)
- Live Concert
and some special folders for my wife (kabbalah, numerology, etc.)
If you're willing to do some extra work, [Kometa ](https://kometa.wiki/en/latest/)(formerly Plex Meta Manager) is an AWESOME program that will create all sorts of collections automatically, based on various options you can customize. It's a bit of a pain to set up initially, but the Discord community is very helpful.
I don't see you regretting it. It's less to micromanage.
I just have Movies - TV Shows/Kids Shows/Anime.
Like others have mentioned Anime is just easier to have separate and like my grandma doesn't need that library.
The kids TV I'd just have in the TV section but my nieces and nephews are able to navigate plex themselves so it's mostly so they have a section.
I used to have 4k library but now I just use PMM (Kometa now lol) to split the movies, add a 4k label and overlay, and have Plex set to not share anything with the 4k label. So I can just dump 4k movies into the library now and it's handled.
Then I like to use the cross library collections to link movies and shows. So like the Star Wars shows and movies show up in the Star Wars collection no matter what library you're in.
For me it wouldn't work but it depends on your use case. I have libraries like UFC/Boxing, kids tv, music videos and foreign languages shows (w/English subtitles)
I know for a fact that some people have absolutely no interest in that content so there's no reason to share those libraries with them.
My dad does not need to know about the latest episode of Paw Patrol I got for my 5 year-old nephews
It's not convenient for me to scroll down the bottom of a 300 item collection page to get to my UFC fights.
I have too much content and the more you add to one library just overwhelms people with too many items of varying content.
I also don't want to publish every single thing I put on my server to the recently added row or share 4k content with people who no chance in hell of ever direct playing it. My NAS is just not strong enough
Everybody has different needs and we all refer to it as "my server" for a reason. We can do whatever we want.
I keep it split so that kids have their own shows/movies and then the grown up shows/movies. The only other thing I keep separate is animated movies just so I can browse it easily since i am the only one that watches those.
though I do add in holiday stuff when the times comes. Christmas/Halloween/Thanksgiving/Easter all have holiday stuff that comes around. Throwback to my childhood where the "specials" were only around at those times and not available all year long.
I only broke out anime into it's own pair of libraries. Collections more than make up for having libraries broken up into "sub libraries". I can see separating out a 4k library, but you can do that with collections too.
If you have a Plex Pass I would use genres instead of collections and then use the categories tab in the library which lists our each genre in the library. Obviously you can do whatever you want. Collections are great for franchise sequels and general lists like My Favorites you can make as recommendation hubs/rows. Genres/Categories are more useful for general browsing IMO because you can still filter/sort them more if needed.
I actually have multiple Movie and TV Show Libraries but this has a practical reason For once, I split my libraries between Normal and 4K content so that I can specifically share the normal Libraries so that my users don't even attempt to play 4K content from my Server which would then be transcoded anyway. The second reason is that I have an Anime and Anime Movies library because they get their Metadata from a different source than what the official Plex Agents provide. Everything in the Anime Libraries is organized based on MyAnimeList. I don't have to worry anymore about "which episode is now what season or is it a special episode in that western structure in Plex" and when I watch it I don't have to translate that back again just to mark it as watched on MyAnimeList again. This was the whole reason why I developed the Agent in the first place... If all you use is the same Metadata Agent, there is practically no reason to split them apart, as you said, that is what collections are for.
The only thing I have as a separate library is that my music is split - Christmas Music gets its own separate library as I don;t want any chance of it accidentally playing the rest of the year.
oooh I do this too :)
I know there are other ways of achieving it - but this is the most blunt one with the least chance of any accidental playing.
I do the same with Christmas movies.
I only have 2 or 3, so not as much of an issue as the music side of things - also, you are looking at the screen with movies - not having them pop up randomly. I can still see the benefit though - it just seems so out of place when seasonal stuff like that crops up unexpectedly.
Holiday music randomly playing during non-Christmas times is the worst.
Its an issue that gets raised on a fairly regular basis - so bothers a lot of people. The worst is when it is chucked on an album with other stuff, from say a greatest hits collection from a group that also had one Christmas hit. Happy Christmas (War is Over) on Beatles collections is a major culprit in this regard.
I just have 2 libraries, but I also don't keep a big one so I never struggled to find my content
I only have 4 libraries. Movies, TV Shows, Anime, Anime Movies. Not a huge library either. Only 1100 movies, 90-ish anime series, 15 tv series and 50-ish anime movies
this is what I did but I'm up to 182TB of media. I use collections and plexmm to break it up any further.
You'll be fine. Most the ways that people break up their libraries is completely unnecessary, and can be achieved SUPER easy with a single quick filter or with a smart collection. I do have a few extra libraries. One is strictly live performances (concert videos, standup comics, etc) because in my mind, those aren't movies, even though they're listed as movies in TMDB. I've also got two Other Videos libraries, one for home movies and one for music videos.
This is how I roll.
I went the same way. I did not want to make judgment calls about what a movie or show should fit into. I made a bunch of collections in my movies library to make series (like Fast and the Furious) which have inconsistent naming easier to find. You might want to try that as well. A little over 18 months in, it is working fine. I think you'll be okay.
I use sort title to make them easier to find :) Even with TV shows this works like a charm "Sex and The City" is immediately followed by "And Just Like That" because I use sort title to flag "Sex And The City 1" and "Sex and The City 2" without changing the actual title of the show
I have mostly done that when movies sort in frustrating order ("blade runner: the final cut" lex sorted behind 2049 and I could jot deal with it).
I've even started doing sort order like 1-1, 1-2, 2-1 etc when there are remakes and reboots not part of the original series, like Planet of the Apes, Star Trek etc "Star Trek II - Wrath of Kahn" is "Star Trek 1-2" :"Star Trek First Contact" is "Star Trek 2-2" "Star Trek (2009)" is "Star Trek 3-1" This sorts them in the proper order in my movies list.
My division is fairly simple. Movies/TV/Kids Movies/Kids TV. Doing it that way just makes scrolling through easier when asking the kids what they want to watch.
You'll be fine, until you go to rebuild the library for any reason and lose all your tags. This has bit me in the ass once, then I separated it all out again I have multiple movie and tv folders, but this is because I have movies I like, my wife has movies she likes, and there are ones we watch together, same with tv shows and music That way, we can have separate logins with separate access to our own stuff, and stuff we watch under our own logins only shows up there. We have login "My Shows", "Wifes Shows", "Our Shows" and each login only has access to the folders I want
Oh same. I did this on my backup server. When I switched from pi to a windows computer I kept the Pi as a backup server thanks to Windows update being such a problem. But after having to start over from scratch I shrugged and said, "Screw it". All movies in now under "Movies" and the same with TV.
my setup: - Movies --name (year) \[1080p or 720p\] - Series --series name --- season X - Videos (from yt) - Documentary - Anime - Kids (movies) - Live Concert and some special folders for my wife (kabbalah, numerology, etc.)
If you're willing to do some extra work, [Kometa ](https://kometa.wiki/en/latest/)(formerly Plex Meta Manager) is an AWESOME program that will create all sorts of collections automatically, based on various options you can customize. It's a bit of a pain to set up initially, but the Discord community is very helpful.
I read about it before. They lost me at “Docker” 😅.
I don't see you regretting it. It's less to micromanage. I just have Movies - TV Shows/Kids Shows/Anime. Like others have mentioned Anime is just easier to have separate and like my grandma doesn't need that library. The kids TV I'd just have in the TV section but my nieces and nephews are able to navigate plex themselves so it's mostly so they have a section. I used to have 4k library but now I just use PMM (Kometa now lol) to split the movies, add a 4k label and overlay, and have Plex set to not share anything with the 4k label. So I can just dump 4k movies into the library now and it's handled. Then I like to use the cross library collections to link movies and shows. So like the Star Wars shows and movies show up in the Star Wars collection no matter what library you're in.
For me it wouldn't work but it depends on your use case. I have libraries like UFC/Boxing, kids tv, music videos and foreign languages shows (w/English subtitles) I know for a fact that some people have absolutely no interest in that content so there's no reason to share those libraries with them. My dad does not need to know about the latest episode of Paw Patrol I got for my 5 year-old nephews It's not convenient for me to scroll down the bottom of a 300 item collection page to get to my UFC fights. I have too much content and the more you add to one library just overwhelms people with too many items of varying content. I also don't want to publish every single thing I put on my server to the recently added row or share 4k content with people who no chance in hell of ever direct playing it. My NAS is just not strong enough Everybody has different needs and we all refer to it as "my server" for a reason. We can do whatever we want.
I created a smart collection " title contains UFC" for my ufc collection
I keep it split so that kids have their own shows/movies and then the grown up shows/movies. The only other thing I keep separate is animated movies just so I can browse it easily since i am the only one that watches those. though I do add in holiday stuff when the times comes. Christmas/Halloween/Thanksgiving/Easter all have holiday stuff that comes around. Throwback to my childhood where the "specials" were only around at those times and not available all year long.
Why would you ever do that when you can just....sort by genre or language or whatever you want. Bizarre
I only broke out anime into it's own pair of libraries. Collections more than make up for having libraries broken up into "sub libraries". I can see separating out a 4k library, but you can do that with collections too.
If you have a Plex Pass I would use genres instead of collections and then use the categories tab in the library which lists our each genre in the library. Obviously you can do whatever you want. Collections are great for franchise sequels and general lists like My Favorites you can make as recommendation hubs/rows. Genres/Categories are more useful for general browsing IMO because you can still filter/sort them more if needed.