Oh, it will play them just fine, but good luck finding the video you're looking for when the keyword starts at the 50th character in the filename.
"Oh, that's such an edge case" - well, sure, but it is also completely not difficult to implement:
a) wildcard search on filenames
b) add a list mode that shows the complete filename, rather than having to sit and watch it scroll (say you've got 50 videos number #1 thru #50 and you want to play #39 - have fun with that)
I use to use Plex and really liked it. If I ever got a TV again, that's what I was going to use, but I had no idea it had a 50 character filename search limitation. That's so weird!
* Unless there is other metadata, the filename becomes the title, and the title is searchable.
* Text search appears to be fulltext-style:
* A title like "2017-01-12 09-23-45.mpg" will be found with a search for "01-12".
* "20170112" is found when I search for "201701" but not if I search for "0112".
* The web UI list view is quite wide, but still appears to truncate after about 80 characters (even though that's less than half the screen width on my 1920px wide monitor).
Well that's fantastic news, glad to see they changed their mind.
Sadly, it still fails for me as many of my file names are quite long with the differentiating aspect being beyond the 80th character. The option to wrap filenames would fix that problem.
There's a thumbnail view, a detailed view, and a list view. Does the list view truncate the title? I only started using Plex a few days ago but I don't recall it cutting names short when I swapped to the List View for a moment.
I'll check again tonight when I get the opportunity - but I imagine a name would need to be quite long for List View to not be good enough (assuming it doesn't truncate).
E:
Thank you gregmac for checking and reporting in with your findings. :)
"Oh, that's such an edge case" - well, sure, but it is also completely not difficult to implement:
a) wildcard search on filenames
b) add a list mode that shows the complete filename, rather than having to sit and watch it scroll (say you've got 50 videos number #1 thru #50 and you want to play #39 - have fun with that)