I use Plex to manage my music and video libraries. I actually don’t watch sports very often. The one exception is when I’m grading papers (I’m a college professor). I’ve found that watching soccer/futbol matches in the background while I grade papers breaks up the monotony of grading. With finals coming up, I thought it would be a good idea to record a few games so I had about 10 hours of soccer matches to watch while I grade papers. But I also realized that I wouldn’t remember which matches I had watched, how far into them I was, and I might want to watch some on my TV and others on my computer. Thus, why not put the matches on Plex?
That’s when I realized that Plex doesn’t really have a way to organize sports events. Plex is remarkably good at pulling the relevant information for movies and TV shows (I actually use tinyMediaManager to do the renaming and organizing for movies and TV shows, then put them into the respective Plex folders, which works extremely well). But Plex doesn’t have built-in functionality for recognizing sports events. That, in itself, isn’t a problem. I just need it to recognize the files in a library and keep track of what I’ve watched and what I haven’t. So, here’s how I organized the files.
I created a new top-level folder next to the same folder where I store my movies and TV shows that I called “sports”:
Inside, I created a separate folder for the league I wanted to watch – English Premier League, UEFA Europa League, etc. If I was planning on keeping the games after I watched them, I would have added a folder below that for the year, but I delete the recorded games after I watch them. So, the folder structure looks like this:
I then named the files as follows: [DATE]-[TEAM1 VS TEAM2]. This structure is visible in the above image.
In Plex, click on settings:
Scroll down to “MANAGE” Libraries and click on it:
Click on ADD LIBRARY
In the window that pops up, select “Other Videos.” That lets Plex know that it doesn’t need to try to retrieve metadata for the videos (this is also the option I choose for my home movies):
Name the folder. I called mine “sports”:
Click “Next” then find the top-level folder you created earlier:
Once you’ve found the folder, you’re ready to click ADD LIBRARY.
This tutorial was done using Plex 4.32.1. With that version, you have the option of pinning libraries to your home screen. I went ahead and pinned sports to my home screen so I can see it quickly:
Click on the library and you should see a list of all the sports videos you have in the library:
As you can see in the image above, I had started watching one of the games when I made this tutorial. This is why using Plex to watch the games is so nice – it keeps track of where I was and I can switch between devices.
NOTE: Tutorial created using Plex version 4.32.1.
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