Custom Playlists for Locally Stored Content?

Channels DVR Server Feature Requests
#1

Hello.
I have an extensive Plex library where I have digitized all the media I have acquired over the years and have been using Plex for accessing that content. Plex doesnt support TV everywhere or have a DVR function so, I have just been using both platforms. Channels for TV/DVR, Plex for watching my local content.

I just recently discovered you can import your local Movie and TV show content into Channels but one thing I am not seeing is how to create a playlist. I own many full series of shows and many of them have a few holiday episodes in each season. In Plex, I have created a playlist where I can add each holiday episode in a given series so that I can call up the playlist and play only the episodes I have put in the list. At first, I thought “collections” was the equivalent but there doesn’t seem to be a way to add individual episodes to a collection. It seems to add the entire series to a collection.

So my request is, please allow a way to create custom playlists for my content that I have stored locally for playback.

#2

You are correct. While we have Collections, which are groups of movies or tv shows, we don’t have playlists, lists of episodes.

We have plans to rectify that.

1 Like
#3

Thanks for the quick reply. Please implement this soon!

As a workaround, I tried a couple different things.
First, I created a new TV folder called TV Holiday. Copied the show and added “holiday” to the show title then copied its season folders and the holiday episodes within each over. Then I added the new folder as a source. Channels did add the content but it merged them into the same thumbnail in the UI. For example, if the holiday episode in season 3 was episode 9, there are now two episode 9’s within season 3. I had hoped it would create a separate instance of the show (ie…Mike & Molly AND Mike & Molly Holiday) but it didnt.

Next I tried favoriting the holiday episodes. That works as a way to have them grouped within the show level view. What doesnt work is if I start playing the favorites, it doesnt auto play the next episode in the favorites list. Instead, it plays the favorite episode that I started and when its over auto-plays the next episode in the season.

#4

Have you considered creating a Virtual Channel for these? Perhaps adding a tag to the episodes and then use a Smart Rule to select episodes with that tag?

I think that would even update the Virtual Channel with new episodes as they are tagged.

1 Like
#5

Playlists have just gone into beta