Secret Tips For… Plex
Add home movies, name your films, TV shows and music correctly, automatically restart Plex if it crashes, and listen to audiobooks
Create a category for home movies
Plex streams your home movies just as smoothly as film and TV shows, but by default it will mix your home movies collection with commercial films, making them difficult to find. To avoid this, create a Libraries listing on Plex’s main menu that contains only home movies.
In File Explorer, create a folder within your Videos folder and call it Home Movies. Now cut and paste all of your own movies from your Videos folder into this new Home Movies folder. Open Plex, hover the cursor over Libraries (on the left), then click the ‘+’ symbol. When the Add Library window opens, click ‘Other videos’, type Home Movies into the Name field (see screenshot below), then click Next. Click ‘Browse for Media Folder’, navigate to the Home Movies folder you’ve just created, click Add, then Add Library. You’ll see the new Home Movies library listed on the left in the Libraries section.
Restart Plex if it crashes
If Plex crashes when you’re watching something, it usually means you have to manually restart the server. With Knas Restarter ( www.snipca.com/26010), Plex will re-launch itself. To download it use the ‘trusted Download’ button – ignore the ‘Would you like to install Software Informer…’ pop-up advert. Open Knas, click Plex Media Server.exe in the Process field, then click the Select button beneath it. Make sure Enable Restart is ticked (see screenshot above), change the Startup Window dropdown menu to Minimized, click Save Settings, then click Start (bottom right). Plex will now automatically restart if it crashes.
Rename videos and music
To help Plex organise your films, TV shows and music correctly (and download the correct cover art, etc), it’s important to abide by Plex’s file-naming conventions. First, make sure you have a folder for Movies, Music and TV Shows, then cut and paste the relevant media files into each folder. The Movies folder is the easiest one to tackle – the only thing you need to watch out for is adding the year in brackets after films with the same name, eg War of the Worlds (2005).
TV Shows are trickier. First, you need to create a subfolder for each show (eg The Wire), then another for each season (Season 01, Season 02, etc). Cut and paste individual video files for each season into the relevant folders, then rename each video by the name of the show, season (s) and episode (e) number – eg The Wire – s01e01, The Wire s01e02 and so on.
Music works a little differently. Name each folder by the artist and album name (eg The Beatles – Revolver). Each track should then be named by the track number, then track name (eg 01 – Taxman). The full structure for this example would be: C:/music/the Beatles – Revolver/01 – Taxman (see ‘Rename music files in bulk’ tip on page 53 to find out how to do this quicker). Once your re-structuring is finished, open Plex, move the cursor over Libraries, click the three dots, then click Scan Library Files to have Plex re-scan your files.