Quote of the day:

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
—Gracie Allen

I like Plex but I get the feeling that Plex doesn’t like me.

Plex is the technology that allows me to take all my DVDs and Blu-rays, and after ripping them into video files on my Mac, put them neatly into libraries that lets me view them from any of my devices. Most frequently I watch the videos on my large screen TV in my living room using my Apple TV to retrieve the files.

Generally, the system works well, which is why I like it, but there are some, uh, snags.

For one thing, the fine people at Plex Central, or whatever, have a difficult time supporting all the various devices that they need to support, so they spend most of their time and effort supporting devices that are used by a great number of people, things like iPhones and iPads and (probably) android  devices (but I know very little about such things). Alas, that means that we Apple TV users get relatively short shrift in the support department, as we are a small but hardy breed.

Secondly, there is the matter of the way the videos are detected by the Plex software. One has to assign file names in a specific format. For the most part, this is not a problem.

So for example, the first episode of the first season (or series) of Downton Abbey should be given a filename of:

Downton Abbey – s01e01 – this is the first episode.mkv

Movies are named with their year, so the first Downton movie is:

Downton Abbey (2019) – the first movie version.mkv

Anything after that second hyphen (or the first in the case of movies) is ignored, so one can add anything one wants there. I usually add the title of the episode if I know it.

This works well for all the regular season episodes. However, some shows have additional special episodes, plus if one buys the Blu-rays as I do there are often extra features, so Plex needs to allow a way for its customers to code those as well.

What’s important here is that everyone needs to agree on how to do it. If Downton Abbey puts out a Christmas Special, then the customer needs to know how to name that file so that Plex will recognize it as the Christmas Special. Similarly, everyone has to agree on how to name those extra features so Plex will show them along side the regular episodes.

Well!

Plex uses an outside service to come up with the coding for those special episodes, and a few years ago they changed services so the coding of those special episodes changed. Which means that if I want all those special Christmas episodes to show up in the correct order when I’m watching a program, I need to change the names of the video file names of some of those files.

Similarly, the way I’ve been naming the extra feature episodes has been causing me problems as well, at least partly because the Apple TV isn’t as fully supported as some other platforms are.

As it happens, because of all the DVDs and Blu-rays that I’ve bought, as well as the videos that I’ve downloaded from YouTube and other sources, I’ve been running out of disc space on my Plex server (it’s just a Mac mini that I dedicate to running Plex). So I’ve started to re-compress all those video files. And while I’m doing that, I’m also trying to rearrange and rejigger the file names so that they conform to the newer way of Plex doing things. In some cases this means that Plex thinks a video file that I’ve had for years and watched a long time ago is a brand new video episode.

Oh, well.

Meanwhile, there is another Plex annoyance. If a video has, say, two audio tracks, and one is mono and the other is stereo, Plex will select the stereo track automatically, not matter what. This can be very annoying when the movie is something like The Grapes of Wrath, which I just added from the Blu-ray and which has a mono audio track and also a stereo commentary track. Obviously, I want the default to be the mono track, but there’s no way to get Plex to select that (even though in the video file the mono track is flagged as the primary default and the commentary track as the commentary flag set). It sees the stereo track and assumes it’s better than the mono track. This has been a long-standing complaint on the Plex forums, but Plex hasn’t gotten around to fixing it. So the first time I play that video, I have to manually select the mono track.