I care about a lot of things that are important, just generally speaking.
But I also care about some *really* inconsequential shit.
For example, I care a great deal about media. Not just in the sense that I view understanding media as an important because media influences thought, but also because I really just enjoy film and TV.
To that end, I spend a fair amount of time consuming media, and reading about, and thinking about and talking about media.
Recently, I've been in to radio shows and audio plays.
This is a section of our media history that often gets downplayed or ignored today. Considering how important it was historically in the English Speaking world, and how much good stuff is out there for free, and how long many of us spend commuting, I feel like Radio is due for a resurgence.
Modern Media tools aren't great at dealing with audio plays. They either want to treat them like music or like books. This doesn't work well. They are more like TV than like Movies or Books.
Fighting with Plex to get it to recognize this has been an exercise in frustration, and also an education in how to use #plex well.
I'm going to talk about that a bit.
First, #plex does actually have Okay #audiobook support, or at least it can be made to.
If this is what you care about, you're in luck!
There's a thing called the Unofficial App Store. It's pretty simple to install (instructions are available in various places around the net.)
Once installed, there's an "audiobook" agent that scrapes audible for book info.
Set the library up as a music library, use the audiobook agent, be sure to check "remember track progress."
Bob's your uncle.
Books are different from radio plays though.
Radio plays, so far, have meant a lot of manual tinkering, and I'm not completely happy with the outcome, but it's not horrible.
First, make a TV library with one of the Media Agent's that means it won't scan TVDB or whatever.
Second, take all your mp3s, and rename them to m4vs.
Third, use something like the Bulk Rename Utility to rename your files to match plex's naming conventions.
After that, you have to manually add metadata, which is annoying.
But it's the best solution I've come up with so far.
I'm going to explore using an external media manager to do this stuff, but that sounds like a lot of work that I don't want to mess with tonight.
@ajroach42
Maybe make static RSS feeds for them and use one of the simpler podcatchers?
@freakazoid I've done that in the past, and it works pretty well.
At the least, that gets the episodes in order, and if you use correct file names, you can get it to work reasonably well.
I've done it with this: https://github.com/herrbischoff/screaming-liquid-tiger
I'll have to look at our set top box and see if it has a podcatcher available. That might save some headache compared to trying to get everything to work in plex.
(Also in the unofficial app store is a thing for downloading trailers to preroll before films. I added that, and I like it a lot. I've been manually adding more trailers from Archive.org. I also added a version of the Regal Policy roller coster to play before films, to give movie nights the appropriate gravitas.)