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+--- Thread: Let me tell you about how much I love collections + shuffle (/t-let-me-tell-you-about-how-much-i-love-collections-shuffle)
Let me tell you about how much I love collections + shuffle - FactoriedMyAuth - 2024-04-19
I have only been playing with Jellyfin for a month and have never used a media organizer before. I had a handful of blu-rays and some movie files, but never enough to justify anything more complex than Windows Explorer. Eventually I started collecting physical media and a friend gave me an old NAS, and now I have a new hobby!
I always grumbled about streaming services not having a shuffle button for series where stuff was basically full of bottle-episodes (lots of Trek, cartoons, X-Files, Stargate ...). I was super excited when I put my first set of TNG episodes in Jellyfin and there was a shuffle button. Holy cow! I can bounce between seasons and just be happy some random Trek is on.
I have been experimenting with the Collections options to create my own little, for lack of a better description, TV Channels. I have a collection that is only the Trek series that really don't have long arcs (pretty much everything other than DS9 and Discovery). I can hit shuffle on that collection and just get all the one-off episodes I want. I will eventually do this with Stargate too.
I found this also works great for movies. I have a Disney Cartoon collection/channel and when I want to watch a cartoon movie and not pick something, I just click the collection and hit shuffle to just get a random movie. I am going thru my main movie library and creating collections by genre and other identifiers so that I can just choose to play a random horror movie or a random Nicholas Cage movie.
I still haven't found out if I can set up rules for a collection like "add all movies with genre horror to this collection" and have it just automatically populate when something new is added that matches. I figure, once I get everything sorted out, it will be minimal effort to add a new movie to multiple collections.