I’m 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. And the more content you add, the more you’ll need it to be organized or the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.Īs a caveat before we move on to the meat of this entry, this post is not about streaming or transcoding.

If you’re not willing to make that effort, well, garbage in garbage out, you’ll get out of your libraries what you put into them. But there’s some genre and collection metadata that has to be input via the Plex UI. 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. I try to steer away as much as possible from organizing or tagging content via the Plex UI, as that metadata won’t survive if you have to rebuild a library from scratch, which over the years is likely to happen eventually. If you have to take anything from this post, it’s that each type of content needs its own library with an approach that’s finetuned to it.Īs much as I try to use automation and rely on Plex’s 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 it’s meant to be consumed.

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. It’s been a long journey and I hope to accelerate your own learning curve. Over the past decade I went back and forth between Plex and Emby as my media server of choice but eventually settled on the former after I switched my server from my desktop PC to an Nvidia Shield, then to a Docker container in a Synology NAS. 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.

It’s very easy to get started with Plex to handle a simple movie or TV show collection, 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.

Audio books on plex