Using Plex: A Guide to Organizing Your Video Library

One way to get started with using Plex is by utilizing the existing folders and features within the app. For example, I have a folder called "YuYu Hakusho extras" that contains the extra clips from the discs of the series. This allows me to easily access all of these extras in one place. The feature of adding them to the playlist is straightforward: clicking on the "Add to Playlist" button and selecting the show or episode I want to add it to.

However, what's more interesting is when you have a collection of extras like this, alongside your actual episodes and movies. This was my original plan for organizing my video library, but instead of creating a separate folder for everything, I decided to use Plex's existing features to keep things organized. Now, I can go to the TV shows section, select "YuYu Hakusho", and add all of the extras to it, alongside the actual episodes. This way, I can easily reorder them and drag them around as needed.

This approach also applies to movies. In my case, I don't have any traditional movie extras, but I do have some work print releases that were created by fans using original film slides and other materials. These are a bit more complicated to organize, but using Plex's features makes it easy to keep them separate from the originals without having to replace them. For example, I can create a playlist called "Star Wars" and add all of my different versions of the movies to it, including the work print releases. This way, I can easily access each version of a movie without having to worry about keeping track of multiple copies.

Plex's search function is also worth noting, as it allows me to quickly find specific episodes or movies within my library. While searching is not ideal for manually selecting individual items, I can click on the little dots at the top right corner and select "Add to Playlist" from there. This feature has been a concern of mine when it comes to my collection of despecialized versions of movies - having multiple custom releases and work print versions that need to be kept together without replacing the originals.

Using Plex is not just about organizing your video library, but also about making it easy to watch and enjoy your favorite shows and movies. With its features like playlists, search, and organization, I can now easily access my entire collection from one place. For example, I have a specific playlist for my anime openings that I can use when I'm in the mood for something quick and fun.

My experience with Plex has also made me realize just how much of a difference it can make in terms of organization and accessibility. In the past, I would often find myself getting frustrated with my video collection because it was so disorganized and difficult to navigate. But now that I have a general idea of what's possible with Plex, I'm excited to start organizing my library and exploring all the features and capabilities that it has to offer.

One area where I've made significant progress is by implementing a system for tracking down missing or lost media files. This was one thing that initially seemed daunting, but turned out to be not too bad at all. By using Plex's search function and searching through my library, I was able to track down missing Bob Ross episodes - it was sad to find that they were no longer showing up in the usual place, but a simple check of Plex's search function revealed where they were actually hiding.

Overall, my experience with Plex has been incredibly positive. From its features to its organization system, everything has come together to make using this app a joy. I'm excited to continue exploring all that it has to offer and finding new ways to use its capabilities to enhance my viewing experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone I'm Adam Ori postbox and I'm a little bit under the weather so I might sound a little weird but today I'm bringing you a kind of impromptu Plex tutorial as I solve one of my own problems with the program now of course I this is sponsored by Plex they do sponsor me to create educational content for their platform but I've been using it as I mentioned in last week's video for going on like four years four or five years now and one of these sections that I have always neglected and never really utilized despite the fact that I have like 50 gigabytes or more worth of footage in is the other videos library or this is what I call it I think by default it's called like home movies but I call it other videos because this is just stuff I've downloaded from the web that I wish to archive or save for myself or whatnot and potentially watch later but then I never use it because if you look at it since there's no inherent metadata to most of these downloaded files or ripped files or what have you it is just a bunch I have I have literally over 9,000 files and none of them really have proper titling now of course this is gonna be like a tips video in a tutorial and so my first tip would be to organize and properly label things as you go but since I have not done that and if you already have a library you have not done that yourself that might be a little tedious so I'm gonna show you a couple ways to kind of clean this up and organize things a little bit right after this I'm Ebel's back here to make tech easier and more fun today talking about plex media server but the other videos are home movies category and you can use this for your actual home movies and once I get this organized I will do so as I actually have some where are they some rips yeah of some home movies dating all the way back to you know the early 90s and some of them even in the 80s and then I need to get organized and placed in different places and things like that but I if you just kind of import 9000 videos like I have it becomes a mess now my again you can put whatever you want in here I typically have video guides that I have purchased or downloaded that we're free from different video platforms a few ripped YouTube videos or like digital foundry gives you videos from their patreon things like that so first and foremost this is the default view it's set to view the individual movies and by title up here at the top and that's great except for the fact that when they're not titled correctly and things and not organized you just get a raw list of videos which is kind of impossible to sort through so easy the number one easiest tip of actually sorting through them is simply to click on movies and click folders and it's not I don't think it will generate thumbnails unfortunately for this kind of stuff so you kind of have to go off the titles for right now but this helps you move through it a lot easier to organize cuz so now instead of having 9,000 listings we have a couple individual videos that aren't in folders but we're down to like 54 entries total which is a lot easier to work with and then we can create what are called playlists which I don't actually use all that much and I want to fix that and you can actually mix and match different media for playlists so I'll show you that in a minute so we're gonna start something basic this is a archive of the digital foundry videos that they had up in their patreon they did and I think it's just digital foundry net that you can download go to the individual folders now this is a little bit more tedious since you can't seem to select entire folders of content but you go into each folder and you click where the little circle is to select items and they come up come up here add to playlist and you can make a playlist for your different media types so this one's going to be digital foundry and and see it's gonna have it there and then sort it by the titles and then you can go in and manage from there so then if I keep doing this it's gonna be kind of annoying if you have to keep clicking through but there you go click click click add to playlist digital foundry wham-o okay and once the playlist is already made it's not gonna take you out of it anymore so that makes it a little bit easier add to playlist digital foundry you get the idea now one feature I would like to see added I kind of use these videos this feature request to is when you're in the playlist view to be able to go on and make new playlists that way when you're first making it it doesn't have to take you out of your current view of your media but that's okay so if you just want to do a sort of your other videos alike that you can do that though for the channel digital foundry we have a plate and we have a playlist called digital foundry but where it gets interesting is when you have extras and things like that so for example here I have this folder called YuYu Hakusho extras and it's the extras clips from the discs of the series so I can check all of these add to playlist yuu-yuu hakusho add BAM alright so those are the extras and we could have made that a dedicated extras folder but instead I can now go to TV shows go down to why you you hack your show it's like season add to playlist yuu-yuu hakusho I'm probably butchering how that's said I do realize that but hey now you have all of the extras but then you have all of the episodes and then you can reorder to your desire you can drag them around and things like that currently it just kind of adds them in the order that you added them in but you have everything together which is really great with movies too I don't think I actually have any movies extras at the moment since I kind of ditched them but I do have I do have some work print releases of some movies that we could theoretically work with here alright for example I have the Empire Strikes Back despecialized edition which was a fan-made project created from the original film slides and the like and so what I can do is exit out of that I can select that and just create a playlist called Star Wars and have all of the different movies of Star Wars in it so then we can pull up the normal movies folder Star Wars do a little search here oh look we got those movies so we can just hit enter and it looks like when you search you can't manually so you can't select the individual ones but you can go over here click the little dots add to playlist Star Wars add to playlist Star Wars and so on and organize it that way which has actually been a concern for mine when it comes to these little despecialized thingies that I have the different custom versions of movies and the work print releases is keeping them together with the originals without replacing the originals and this way I have a dedicated once it loads here playlist with just that and with the you you hacker show I have the episodes alongside the extras as well and then I can just go in if I just want to watch the opening for whatever reason actually like a lot of anime opening so I can totally do this and just watch it just cuz so these are fairly basic things but I've received a lot of questions about basic functionality of Plex and this is something that even I myself have just completely ignored I've just kind of said oh that's gonna take too much time and now that I like have a general idea of what the that's not good my Bob Ross archive is missing I will have to check that out that's really sad I had like the entire rip of Bob Ross and it's showing up as nothing at the moment so I'll have to check that out but that's another thing is I've gone through and I have you know I'm not organized this or kept track of this because of how tedious it seemed when it's actually not that bad at all and so I'm actually really excited to get things organized here and actually be able to watch through some of my weirder video libraries in my Plex library on my TV and my xbox and things like that now that I had this sorted so I hope this video was helpful for you it was helpful for me discovering it along the way if you enjoyed smash the like button get subscribe for more awesome tech tips I have affiliate links for plex in the description down below where you can sign up for a free account you can sign up for a plex class for yourself or you can sign up for a plex pass for a gift for someone else and it all gives a kickback to my channel and helps let them know that I sent you and yada yada but if you are watching this I am uploading this on a Wednesday if you're watching us this up to the Friday after this has been uploaded so like the next couple days I still have a three month free trial code for Plex pass it expires probably over the weekend it was a limited run from that video but I uploaded a video talking about why you might want to use a plex pass and I was given a free trial code that you have a couple more days to act on if you want to use it so go check that out linked in the video description or the YouTube card icon I'm Adam repost Fox here to make tech easier and more fun subscribe for more videos I'll see you next time a post box is a patreon supported production our videos would simply not be possible without the support and generosity of our patrons whom you can see on screen right now if you'd like to join the inner circle and get early access to videos among other things go to patreon.com/scishowhello everyone I'm Adam Ori postbox and I'm a little bit under the weather so I might sound a little weird but today I'm bringing you a kind of impromptu Plex tutorial as I solve one of my own problems with the program now of course I this is sponsored by Plex they do sponsor me to create educational content for their platform but I've been using it as I mentioned in last week's video for going on like four years four or five years now and one of these sections that I have always neglected and never really utilized despite the fact that I have like 50 gigabytes or more worth of footage in is the other videos library or this is what I call it I think by default it's called like home movies but I call it other videos because this is just stuff I've downloaded from the web that I wish to archive or save for myself or whatnot and potentially watch later but then I never use it because if you look at it since there's no inherent metadata to most of these downloaded files or ripped files or what have you it is just a bunch I have I have literally over 9,000 files and none of them really have proper titling now of course this is gonna be like a tips video in a tutorial and so my first tip would be to organize and properly label things as you go but since I have not done that and if you already have a library you have not done that yourself that might be a little tedious so I'm gonna show you a couple ways to kind of clean this up and organize things a little bit right after this I'm Ebel's back here to make tech easier and more fun today talking about plex media server but the other videos are home movies category and you can use this for your actual home movies and once I get this organized I will do so as I actually have some where are they some rips yeah of some home movies dating all the way back to you know the early 90s and some of them even in the 80s and then I need to get organized and placed in different places and things like that but I if you just kind of import 9000 videos like I have it becomes a mess now my again you can put whatever you want in here I typically have video guides that I have purchased or downloaded that we're free from different video platforms a few ripped YouTube videos or like digital foundry gives you videos from their patreon things like that so first and foremost this is the default view it's set to view the individual movies and by title up here at the top and that's great except for the fact that when they're not titled correctly and things and not organized you just get a raw list of videos which is kind of impossible to sort through so easy the number one easiest tip of actually sorting through them is simply to click on movies and click folders and it's not I don't think it will generate thumbnails unfortunately for this kind of stuff so you kind of have to go off the titles for right now but this helps you move through it a lot easier to organize cuz so now instead of having 9,000 listings we have a couple individual videos that aren't in folders but we're down to like 54 entries total which is a lot easier to work with and then we can create what are called playlists which I don't actually use all that much and I want to fix that and you can actually mix and match different media for playlists so I'll show you that in a minute so we're gonna start something basic this is a archive of the digital foundry videos that they had up in their patreon they did and I think it's just digital foundry net that you can download go to the individual folders now this is a little bit more tedious since you can't seem to select entire folders of content but you go into each folder and you click where the little circle is to select items and they come up come up here add to playlist and you can make a playlist for your different media types so this one's going to be digital foundry and and see it's gonna have it there and then sort it by the titles and then you can go in and manage from there so then if I keep doing this it's gonna be kind of annoying if you have to keep clicking through but there you go click click click add to playlist digital foundry wham-o okay and once the playlist is already made it's not gonna take you out of it anymore so that makes it a little bit easier add to playlist digital foundry you get the idea now one feature I would like to see added I kind of use these videos this feature request to is when you're in the playlist view to be able to go on and make new playlists that way when you're first making it it doesn't have to take you out of your current view of your media but that's okay so if you just want to do a sort of your other videos alike that you can do that though for the channel digital foundry we have a plate and we have a playlist called digital foundry but where it gets interesting is when you have extras and things like that so for example here I have this folder called YuYu Hakusho extras and it's the extras clips from the discs of the series so I can check all of these add to playlist yuu-yuu hakusho add BAM alright so those are the extras and we could have made that a dedicated extras folder but instead I can now go to TV shows go down to why you you hack your show it's like season add to playlist yuu-yuu hakusho I'm probably butchering how that's said I do realize that but hey now you have all of the extras but then you have all of the episodes and then you can reorder to your desire you can drag them around and things like that currently it just kind of adds them in the order that you added them in but you have everything together which is really great with movies too I don't think I actually have any movies extras at the moment since I kind of ditched them but I do have I do have some work print releases of some movies that we could theoretically work with here alright for example I have the Empire Strikes Back despecialized edition which was a fan-made project created from the original film slides and the like and so what I can do is exit out of that I can select that and just create a playlist called Star Wars and have all of the different movies of Star Wars in it so then we can pull up the normal movies folder Star Wars do a little search here oh look we got those movies so we can just hit enter and it looks like when you search you can't manually so you can't select the individual ones but you can go over here click the little dots add to playlist Star Wars add to playlist Star Wars and so on and organize it that way which has actually been a concern for mine when it comes to these little despecialized thingies that I have the different custom versions of movies and the work print releases is keeping them together with the originals without replacing the originals and this way I have a dedicated once it loads here playlist with just that and with the you you hacker show I have the episodes alongside the extras as well and then I can just go in if I just want to watch the opening for whatever reason actually like a lot of anime opening so I can totally do this and just watch it just cuz so these are fairly basic things but I've received a lot of questions about basic functionality of Plex and this is something that even I myself have just completely ignored I've just kind of said oh that's gonna take too much time and now that I like have a general idea of what the that's not good my Bob Ross archive is missing I will have to check that out that's really sad I had like the entire rip of Bob Ross and it's showing up as nothing at the moment so I'll have to check that out but that's another thing is I've gone through and I have you know I'm not organized this or kept track of this because of how tedious it seemed when it's actually not that bad at all and so I'm actually really excited to get things organized here and actually be able to watch through some of my weirder video libraries in my Plex library on my TV and my xbox and things like that now that I had this sorted so I hope this video was helpful for you it was helpful for me discovering it along the way if you enjoyed smash the like button get subscribe for more awesome tech tips I have affiliate links for plex in the description down below where you can sign up for a free account you can sign up for a plex class for yourself or you can sign up for a plex pass for a gift for someone else and it all gives a kickback to my channel and helps let them know that I sent you and yada yada but if you are watching this I am uploading this on a Wednesday if you're watching us this up to the Friday after this has been uploaded so like the next couple days I still have a three month free trial code for Plex pass it expires probably over the weekend it was a limited run from that video but I uploaded a video talking about why you might want to use a plex pass and I was given a free trial code that you have a couple more days to act on if you want to use it so go check that out linked in the video description or the YouTube card icon I'm Adam repost Fox here to make tech easier and more fun subscribe for more videos I'll see you next time a post box is a patreon supported production our videos would simply not be possible without the support and generosity of our patrons whom you can see on screen right now if you'd like to join the inner circle and get early access to videos among other things go to patreon.com/scishow\n"