jayvig79/plex-preroll-automation

Plex Preroll Automation is a set of Bash scripts that keeps a Plex media server's Cinema Trailers preroll list automatically synced with a folder of video files. Prerolls are the short clips, similar to movie theater trailers, that Plex can play before the main content starts. Normally, adding or removing these clips means manually editing settings inside Plex, but this project handles that step automatically. A person simply adds, removes, renames, or replaces video files in a designated preroll folder. A watcher script detects the change, regenerates Plex's semicolon separated list of preroll files, and pushes that update to the Plex server through its API, all without any manual editing of Plex settings. Installation is done by cloning the repository and running an included install script, which asks for the preroll folder location, the Plex server's URL, and a Plex API token, then saves those into a single configuration file and makes the other scripts executable. The installer can also generate the initial preroll list and push the first update to Plex right away. To keep everything synced automatically going forward, the watcher script is meant to be scheduled with cron, a standard Linux tool for running tasks on a timer, checking for folder changes every few minutes. From that point on, adding a new video file to the folder is enough to have it appear in Plex's preroll rotation with no further steps. The project requires a running Plex Media Server, Bash, curl, cron, and a Plex API token, but does not require Docker. It is licensed under the MIT License, making it free to use and modify, and was built by Jason Viglione to remove the manual work of maintaining Plex prerolls.