Ability to add movies/episodes in Plex Media Server by browsing and selecting the media file

Feature Suggestions
1

Please add a simple way to just browse to a media file on the server and tell Plex to add it as a movie or series episode that is not picked up by Plex automatically.
This could just be a simple button that opens a file-browser in which one can select the ‘problematic’ media file. After selecting the file Plex could then ask for a movie title or combination of series name, season and episode.

The reason I ask for this is that although I love the automatic recognition of the movies and series, and am pretty impressed by how many go perfectly great, I keep running into cases that Plex just doesn’t pick up.

I know, I know. I can almost predict the responses…
There are naming conventions and there is a folder structure we should use.
And I’m aware and perfectly ok with that.
But even when I try to follow the rules, there are (too many) cases that for mysterious reasons just won’t behave, and we currently have no option to just add it manually (as far as I know).

For example:
I’m currently ripping all my DVDs/Blurays to be transfered to my Plex Server on my NAS.
I have a DVD-set of 8 DVDs containing all the Thunderbirds episodes.
I rip them. Both seasons, all 32 episodes. All ripped consecutively with the same tool, using the same settings, all have the exact same naming convention.
Plex sees 31 episodes without a problem. But there’s one somewhere in the middle where Plex for some reason goes “That is not 100% what I expect, I’ll just ignore that”

Now if Plex would just add it with some generic name, I could manually fix that.
But it just pretends it doesn’t exist.

Of course it’s very well possible I made a mistake. But 1 episode out of 32 is not picked up and spending a day reading blog posts and manuals and desperitely experimenting with changing filenames and adding tmdb IDs without the episode showing up is downright frustrating and a terrible userexperience to say the least. Even if (big if) it eventually turns out I actually made a typo in a filename (which by now I’m pretty sure is not the case).

There are other examples too:
I have a DVD box “The Godfather”. Part II is split across 2 DVDs. I rip them but no matter what I call them Plex will pick up (at most) one of them.
Of course I could try an illegal download of a version of the movie that is not split up. But I won’t do that.

I have some homevideos that Plex just doesn’t recognise. Good luck finding a tmdb ID for those.

Again: very happy with Plex generally, but if there’s any reason for me to look for something else, it’s the frustration of the sensitiveness of the scan in combination of the lack of a means to tell Plex, “there, there, no need to cry, let me show you”.

2

Naming schema aside (which is as you anticipated the big issue)…

Unless you’re trying to add a video named like a tv episode to a movie library (and vice versa), the Plex Scanner will pick the file up and add it to your library.
If your naming is far off or just not sufficient to distinguish files properly, the Plex Agent might mismatch it. Either by identifying it as something totally different or by merging it as a different version / duplicate to an existing movie in your library.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/201543057-why-is-some-of-my-content-not-found/

As for your split release of The Godfather:
Simply put the two files into MKVToolNix and let it „append“ them (no change/transcoding, just stitching the file together). You could also use the file stacking approach by including a suffix in the file names, indicating the file is only a part of s movie.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/

TL;DR (and getting back to your prediction):
That’s a lot of hoops you want to jump through to accomplish something that can be resolved fairly easily by following Plex‘s naming schema.
And as a side note… much safer if you ever get to rebuild your library from scratch (e.g. if your server goes down without working backups…).

3

Without commenting on the merit of the request or its likelihood of being implemented, Plex does provide some tools to help you identify possible problems with naming and organization that can cause problems like these.

For your Thunderbirds example, I suggest checking the duplicates filter. Head into the which contains it and select the Library tab. Then, view episodes by show, and select the duplicates filter:

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It will then list any episodes which have more than one file associated with them. If you “Get Info” on such an episode, you can see the files/paths associated with them.

The ones I show above are intentional (multiple cuts of the same episode) but general you shouldn’t see any duplicates.

4

Just tell the actual file names you are using. I have a hunch that in both cases you are hitting on some special keywords which you ought to avoid.