Two of my movies won’t match after a new install, they were fine with the last 0.9.xxx PMS but now I’m on 1.0.2.2413 these movies are both just showing up as Movie in my library.
They are The Bone Collector and The Green Mile, hardly obscure movies. I have tried manually matching them with both the Plex Movie Scanner and The Movie Database with no luck. Both movies are named correctly with the movie title.
What should I do to get these movies to match correctly?
Thanks
Before you attempt to force anything, may I see your logs? You can zip up the Plex Media Scanner and Plex Media Server logs then attach here.
Did you include the year in your file names? For the Green Mile, there are several movies with that name, so it may not be matching with a high enough score to distinguish the difference. I tried specifically using 1999 and it matched just fine for me. The Bone Collector matched just fine for me so I’m not sure why that might be giving issues.
Also Are you naming the files with “The” in the front? Some people put “, The” at the end and I’ve seen that not match in many cases.
Matching ? Does that mean those movies are not in your library (at all) or you have a blank spot with the movie name in Plex on you webUI
What I am getting at is if it’s not in your webUI how did you find it was missing?
I have more movies (and tv shows) in my actually NAS folders than I have in PLEX.
I want to find the missing ones !
Please copy & paste the names exactly as you have them. It’s usually something really obvious in the renaming / name cleanup that PMS isn’t liking.
I’ve managed to get the films to match by playing round with the agent order in the settings.
It still wasn’t 100% with the auto match thinking the bone collector was The Lego Movie & the green mile was The Peanuts Movie. Manually matching via The Movie Database after this got a match for both films.
The exact file names for the films are
The.Bone.Collector.1999.1080p.BluRay.DTS.dxva.x264.D-Z0N3.mkv
The.Green.Mile.1999.1080p.BluRay.DTS.dxva.x264.D-Z0N3.mkv
@MovieFan.Plex I tried with both options, the year filled in & the year left blank. I’ve had mixed results with other movies so I always try a number of combinations until I get a match. With these two films I was getting a persistent No Matches Found no matter which database or combination of film & year I tried.
@spikemixture the movies were showing up in my library but both of them were labelled Movie, two separate Movie not one with 2 files to choose from. I was trying to match them by clicking on them then selecting match, I’m not sure what you would do if the films weren’t in the library to begin with.
@“Stewie Griffin”
Do these files come with a scene nfo file?
I found out the hard way that Plex actually parses those kinds of nfo files as well. In my case, the movie would match to something unrelated, because the group had put the wrong movie title in the nfo and Plex used that instead of the file name.
So check if that’s the case maybe.
@Stewie Griffin said:
I’ve managed to get the films to match by playing round with the agent order in the settings.It still wasn’t 100% with the auto match thinking the bone collector was The Lego Movie & the green mile was The Peanuts Movie. Manually matching via The Movie Database after this got a match for both films.
The exact file names for the films are
The.Bone.Collector.1999.1080p.BluRay.DTS.dxva.x264.D-Z0N3.mkv
The.Green.Mile.1999.1080p.BluRay.DTS.dxva.x264.D-Z0N3.mkv
Your naming is why Plex is having trouble matching.
“The Green Mile” should be “The Green Mile (1999).mkv”
and
" The Bone Collector" should be “The Bone Collector (1999).mkv”
While other namings may work they are not within specs for Plex’s media.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200381023-Naming-Movie-files
@Elijah_Baley
That is incorrect. His naming is fine, and I am using such naming myself without any issue.
@d2freak said:
@Elijah_Baley
That is incorrect. His naming is fine, and I am using such naming myself without any issue.
You may be using it and it may work BUT it is not what Plex recommends at all. You are obviously free to use it and it is possible that it will continue to work but it could fail at any time because it violates Plex’s stated standards.
Personally I really do not care if other naming methods work or if others want to use different methods but I do know that my library works perfectly and it conforms to the Plex naming scheme as stated in the link I provided earlier.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200381023-Naming-Movie-files
Plex is very persnickety about naming and there is risk of mismatching sometimes if you are outside the standard. Also just because it did work before and does work now does not mean it will work in the future. The only naming scheme that Plex guarantees to work is the one they state in their documentation.
This why you should use the naming as specified
The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)/
The Philadelphia Experiment (2012)/
@d2freak said:
@“Stewie Griffin”
Do these files come with a scene nfo file?I found out the hard way that Plex actually parses those kinds of nfo files as well. In my case, the movie would match to something unrelated, because the group had put the wrong movie title in the nfo and Plex used that instead of the file name.
So check if that’s the case maybe.
Good shout!
There is an nfo file. I have opened one of them up in TextEdit but I don’t really know what I’m looking at here as there is lots of information along with some ASCII art. Maybe this is the source of my trouble.
@Elijah_Baley @ChuckPa I have about 240 other films that all follow a similar naming convention & those two were the only ones giving me any issues. Would the file naming have any effect on trying to manually match the films by entering the name and year?
I assumed that whatever you entered would take priority over whatever Plex thought the film was called, with these two films I was just getting a spinning circle followed by No Matches Found. Until I played about with the order of the agents in the settings, then manually matching suddenly started working as I would expect it to.
@d2freak said:
@Elijah_Baley
That is incorrect. His naming is fine, and I am using such naming myself without any issue.
No, you’re incorrect. The Plex naming convention is clearly documented here. It may work but you can run into issues like the
OP’s.
@Stewie Griffin said:
@Elijah_Baley @ChuckPa I have about 240 other films that all follow a similar naming convention & those two were the only ones giving me any issues. Would the file naming have any effect on trying to manually match the films by entering the name and year?
Two things:
There really is no reason that I can think of to use Plex and not use Plex’s desired naming it is very easy to fix the naming using tools like FileBot and every program I know of has no issue with Plex’s naming.
I know how enamored we can become with our naming choices, I fought tooth an nails when I first adopted Plex, but I finally gave in and renamed my library (1900 movies at the time) and have named correctly every movie I have ripped since and I have not had even one mismatch since. I even had to do a re-install of Plex and every one of my 2100 movies matched perfectly except two where I had the wrong date in parenthesis.
But each person must make their own choice but I find Plex’s naming the best for my library even outside Plex.
While everyone is free to make their own choice as @Elijah_Baley said, and the Scanner’s automaton regex is very good, the adage “Garbage in - Garbage out” will always apply because while we know the context the name is used in, the Scanner does not. It sees a string of characters which should be a name of some ‘class’ (Movie, Television, or Music). I cite the example “ST TNG 1 - OST” Is it obvious to you this refers to “Star Trek: The Next Generation” movie #1 sound track? How is the scanner supposed to correlate that string with “Star Trek: Generations”, released in 1994 ?
Presumably you like using Plex because of the UI, metadata, and all the different ways you can play your media . That having been said, if Plex can’t match the name given it with the internet databases, it won’t be listed in your library. It’s good, but not human or a mind reader. 
I understand the initial reluctance at “Geez, I have to manually rename ALL my files… That will take forever!” . I would fight against that too. There are tools like “The Renamer” and “FileBot” which exist for just this purpose.
I use FileBot. It allows you to specify the naming convention you want. It takes the name you’ve given it and performs the same lookup Plex will… with one exception. If there is ambiguity, it will ASK you to resolve it so the correct name can be used. The Plex scanner can’t because it’s not interactive. Initially, I had about 150 movies in my Library and Plex would require 8+ hours to match and load metadata. I now have over 7000 files between Movies (almost 800) and 135 full television series. A full library rebuild takes about 4 hours on my paultry 24 Mbps DSL line.
While I’m terrible at demonstrating, a screencast can be created to demonstrate FileBot in action.
Speaking as a fellow video enthusiast, it’s well worth the time. I rip a bluray, let filebot fix the naming, toss it into the movie library and within 60 seconds, it’s fully ready to play with metadata.
@d2freak said:
Do these files come with a scene nfo file?I found out the hard way that Plex actually parses those kinds of nfo files as well. In my case, the movie would match to something unrelated, because the group had put the wrong movie title in the nfo and Plex used that instead of the file name.
Actually, Plex doesn’t read the movie title from the .nfo file. It just seeks for what looks like an IMDb ID and uses that, if present.
You can find out the ID by looking up the movie on http://imdb.com
The Bone Collector (1999): The Bone Collector (1999) - IMDb
tt0145681 is the IMDb ID
It is a great way to take Plex by the hand and show it to the right place when it stubbornly refuses to match the files to the right movie (May happen especially if the movie title starts with numbers or special characters).
@OttoKerner
Ah, I didn’t know that. That’s great info. I usually feed ID’s in the filename / folder if I have to (that works too) but your solution is way cleaner.
@“Stewie Griffin”
In your nfo, do a text search for Lego movie or peanuts movie (or check if it contains the wrong imdb id, like @OttoKerner suggests). If that is not what is wrong, then it could be that your movie has metadata in the actual file, that claims the title to be peanut movie or lego movie. You can check this in (I think) VLC. To solve this, move your agent “local media assets” to the bottom, but don’t deselect it.
@d2freak said:
Ah, I didn’t know that. That’s great info. I usually feed ID’s in the filename / folder if I have to (that works too) but your solution is way cleaner.
No, it doesn’t. At best, the ID in the filename is ignored so it doesn’t affect the matching process negatively. You think of a different media player, I guess.
Another tip. If the manual search using the name isn’t working, you can also put in the IMDB id in the search box.
@OttoKerner said:
@d2freak said:
Ah, I didn’t know that. That’s great info. I usually feed ID’s in the filename / folder if I have to (that works too) but your solution is way cleaner.No, it doesn’t. At best, the ID in the filename is ignored so it doesn’t affect the matching process negatively. You think of a different media player, I guess.
Not really. I have to do this some times with TV shows with odd symbols. I can’t simply manually match them since the trakt plugin can’t handle that very good, so I know this trick well 
maybe it’s a side effect of the fact that you can search for ID’s in the title field in manual matching, but rest assured, it does work.
