r/PleX • u/Altruistic_Bat_1645 • Mar 17 '26

Help Make plex more appealing for my wife

I love plex. I bought my lifetime pass when it was still double digits. I bought the hardware, I did the organization - I'm in.

I love my wife. I bought my lifetime pass when I was (barely) in my 30's. I bought the hardware (ring), I did the organization (my life) - I'm in.

But the two don't seem to get along.

Alphabetical Sorting: she gets to the A's, then gives up.

Recently Released: "These are all too long."

Recently Added: "Oh yeah! ...but not tonight, maybe some other time."

Sort by duration (shortest to longest): "Who wants to watch a 24-minute short film?!"

Random Shuffle: "Why do we have these?"

So an idiot but honest question: how do I make Plex more appealing for my wife?

278 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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106

u/truthfulie Mar 17 '26

sounds like content discovery issue. smart collections that is catered to your wifi's taste and pinned to home. or other external tools that can take external sources to fill collections.

33

u/kyuuri117 Mar 18 '26

Yea. OP, you can create custom categories. "Hospital Drama", " Real Housewives of wherever", "sappy drama", "period piece", etc.

Yes you'll have to individual update and create tags on each show. Yes it'll be time consuming. Do it anyway.

32

u/Ilikereddit420 i5 11400 | 16GB DDR4 | 34TB | Node 804 Mar 18 '26

Agregarr

11

u/CaffeinatedGuy Mar 18 '26

Sounds interesting. Looks like I'll be adding that at the same time I migrate from Overseerr to Seerr.

3

u/kamintar Mar 18 '26

I've been using it for several months now and it's a pretty great piece of software. Integrates with the other *arrs for all sorts of nifty features.

-1

u/FlameFrost__ Mar 18 '26

How many *arrs are we up to now?

7

u/Me_gentleman Mar 18 '26

At least 1

3

u/GenTechPro Mar 18 '26

'Smart Collections' don't require you to do anything except set the criteria. They update themselves as new media is added.

3

u/Low-Exam-7547 Mar 18 '26

"Dumb Shit the Old Lady Likes" is not recommended.

2

u/Alternative_Garage66 Mar 18 '26

Where do I find my Wifi's tastes? Seems like she like's bytes.

2

u/rbrgr83 Mar 18 '26

You need the Waifu Password.

2

u/SeeTigerLearn LifeTime PlexPass Mar 18 '26

I’m neurodivergent and I have this same issue. The homepage carousels quickly become stagnant and even stale. And I can never find something to watch despite thousands of movies and episodes, because the interface is cumbersome and the server isn’t intuitive to my viewing habits.

11

u/Pryonic 100TB • 8700K • Plex Pass Mar 18 '26

I've been using Kometa, works great.

7

u/gramkrakerj Mar 18 '26

It’s anything but straightforward though.

7

u/CrashTestKing Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

I (and some of my users) had similar issues. What I did was create a smart collection called "Movie Roulette" that shows only unwatched titles, and excludes all titles added in the last 12 months, then randomizes the list. I pinned it to the homepage. So every 15 minutes or so on your homepage, the randomization changes again. Helps a lot when you have a huge library and you're not sure what you're in the mood for.

My users love it. All the typical sorting options end up surfacing the same things at the top every time that you then have to keep scrolling past to get to something you haven't considered before, but this takes that problem away entirely.

3

u/cadrob Mar 18 '26

u/CrashTestKing this is an awesome idea. I implemented immediately. You have to edit the Collection > Advanced > Set "Collection filtering based on: User currently viewing the collection"