Plex Movie Database

[tkhawkeye]

Hey guys,

I use Plex to stream all of my media to devices around the house. RiffTrax is not a part of their database. I would love to see all of the posters and information on the riff and the riffers uploaded to their database. This make the server fabulous for all of my RiffTrax content. I could download the posters manually, but having this be automated would be a huge bonus.

TK

[Numanoid]

All of the RiffTrax catalog is listed in thetvdb.com, not themoviedb.com.  Categorize your Plex RiffTrax library as a TV Show and it should populate. 

[eegah]

The unfortunate thing about being classified as a "TV Show" instead of a movie is that DVD folders (VIDEO_TS) won't be recognized (at least by Kodi) because only "Movie" folders can be searched recursively. Plus, Kodi won't allow TVDB for movies, so I'm screwed either way.

That was a disappointing thing to learn today. Well, at least my new Fire TV Stick will play DVD files, unlike my Roku.

[JJohnson]

All of the RiffTrax catalog is listed in thetvdb.com, not themoviedb.com.  Categorize your Plex RiffTrax library as a TV Show and it should populate. 

And in Plex, if you categorize as a TV show, we don't get the DVD-style posters for anything at all, which is very frustrating, and Plex is unlikely to add an option for us to choose whether we want thumbnails or DVD-style.  So, for me at least, I have a "Rifftrax" movie library and a "Rifftrax Shorts" movie library so I can use the DVD-style posters.  It's a hack, but it looks better to me.  But the big downside is that I have to download much of the information manually.  But the upside is, that I'm downloading stuff I bought a while back that I forgot I owned and rediscovering some gems in the catalog.

[JohnDoranNY]

In Plex, you simply create a library for TV Shows, and move your RiffTrax content there.  It will use TheTVDb Database and find the shows/descriptions for RiffTrax, MST3K, The Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic and The Mads are Back.  My only grip is thumbnail images are almost never uploaded so you get a scrapped version from Plex which is very rarely ever appealing.  I have taken the time to create cover art/background images for all the above listed shows to use in Plex (since I am a bit anal retentive about it). I did try to share this with others by uploading to TheTVDB only to have such images immediately deleted and the ability to upload locked (kinda infuriating).  However, I would still be willing to share what I have so far if anyone, like me, houses their Riff collections in Plex (or Kodi). I am unsure if there are any online forums to post such images to.

[Imrahil]

All of the RiffTrax catalog is listed in thetvdb.com, not themoviedb.com.  Categorize your Plex RiffTrax library as a TV Show and it should populate. 

And in Plex, if you categorize as a TV show, we don't get the DVD-style posters for anything at all, which is very frustrating, and Plex is unlikely to add an option for us to choose whether we want thumbnails or DVD-style.  So, for me at least, I have a "Rifftrax" movie library and a "Rifftrax Shorts" movie library so I can use the DVD-style posters.  It's a hack, but it looks better to me.  But the big downside is that I have to download much of the information manually.  But the upside is, that I'm downloading stuff I bought a while back that I forgot I owned and rediscovering some gems in the catalog.

You can do episode-specific posters, but they're widescreen. I've been going through and adding them for the episodes I have.

[eegah]

I finally graduated to Plex on a Fire Stick from previously using a WDTV media player or Roku Media Player. The WD player would play DVD (VIDEO_TS) files, but I couldn't get it to recognize my new NAS. The Roku player is pretty basic but worked; however Roku dropped surround sound support recently so I switched to the Fire Stick. I'm in the process of converting my DVD files with Handbrake.

As said above, the Plex widescreen thumbnail image format is annoying because Rifftrax posters are cropped. The scraped images CAN be interesting, though. Plex appears to pull an image from the exact middle of the video file which for Birdemic is the horse urine scene.

Another annoying thing about Plex is that it isn't strict about file name convention. If you have files with any numbers in the name, it may identify those as an episode even though they are not. Sometimes you can manually fix it, sometimes not. Plus, it orders episodes by episode number, not date. Normally that would be ok but many Rifftrax episodes, specials, etc. are numbered out of order in TheTVDB.

[eegah]

Plex will not find the vast majority of my Rifftrax shorts. The funny thing is if I move them to a new directory ("shorts2"), it finds them just fine. If I remove the empty "shorts" directory and change the "shorts2" directory name back to "shorts", it loses them again. Same if I just rename the "shorts" directory to "shorts2" and back again. However, if I create a subdirectory in "shorts" it finds them. The few shorts that it finds are in my "specials" directory. It's like it hates files in directories named "shorts", except if they are in subdirectories. 

So the solution was to just rename my "shorts" directory to "shorts2" and it finds everything. Same for my "presents/shorts" directory.