Adding extra metadata to Local Media Assets for TV Series and Movies // mod: using local metadata files like NFO, others

Feature Suggestions
,
1

Context: The Local Media Assets for TV shows and Movies currently covers only artwork (posters, background, banners), subtitles, themes and other media (like extras, deleted scenes, trailers, etc.)

Problem: There’s a need to add extra metadata or tags like Studio, Release Date, Original Title, Tagline, Summary, Tags (collections) and multi-values like Genre, Cast (actors), Writers and Directors (among many others) for offline not indexed-content such as Personal Videos (or YouTube or Vimeo downloaded media) so it can be added in this same way.

As it has been suggested in the past: JSON format, YAML format, NFO support, XML agent, extended Personal Media agents, exportTools agent or Lambda Agent have made efforts on this front as a workaround. But now that the plug-ins are a thing of the past and given the constant evolution of the new Agents and Scanners, it might be interesting to explore this idea once again to ship it inside the same Plex Media Server.

My suggestion: Since there is already code in the LocalMedia.bundle (specially in the videohelpers.py) to “guess” these parameters from mp4 metadata; my suggestion is to add the functionality to read an external file in either JSON (like youtube), YAML, NFO, XML or any other text based format under the same directory of the Movie, Series or Personal Video.

The advantage of this approach is to not depend only on partial metadata that might be on the video container (like mp4 or mkv does) and being able to edit and ship quickly without re-encoding those formats or to add that value for those formats that don’t support it.

Thank you guys in advance.

2

Do It.

3

Yes, please add this feature. There have been so many threads posted on this forum begging for this feature, when will the devs add stuff people need and stop wasting time on crap like Plex Live TV and Web shows that no one ever uses?

It’s just trying to be a jack of all trades and losing focus on its core user base. We only need it to be one thing, a media manager for personal content. And part of doing that well is adding fully fledged support for local metadata.

3 Likes
4

3 posts were split to a new topic: Episode titles based on local metadata

5

I’m just another user who joins this request.

Please, dev team, LISTEN TO OUR NEEEDS.

6

Yes, please add this! Instead of, or in addition to, an external file, Plex could read the embedded MP4, ID3V2 etc. tags and map to Plex fields.

Using this approach I am able to populate the Plex Summary field by mapping the LONGDESCRIPTION in the MP4 tag. Unfortunately, that is the only field I’ve been able to successfully force my personal videos to populate.

7

Please add this feature. Local summary files would be a massive upgrade for me. support for summary.txt would be great, even better would be support for txt and nfo.

8

I’ve been actively searching for a feature like this over the last couple of days and only found this thread (and others) requesting the same thing.

A local text file would be exactly what I need, along the same lines as a “.plexmatch” file, maybe you could call it “.plexmetadata”?

Even if I needed to have one .plexmetadata file per media file, I don’t care.

I really need some way to add my own metadata as I use .mkv containers exclusively and embedded metadata (apparently) doesn’t work outside an .mp4 (and even then doesn’t carry nearly enough information anyway)?.

1 Like
9

It is really disappointing that I can embed Movies with Collections metadata, but I cannot do the same for TV Shows. The MP4 Album tag works for movies, but not for TV shows, so I would like to at least be able to add a file to the TV show folder with proper metadata so that my Collection work is more hard-coded if I ever have to rebuild.

10

tldr: GitHub - mrzhenya/plex-plugins at prod

Hi all! As a video creator that generates a lot of home video content and uses Plex, I too wished there was a better support for local media files in Plex Media Server. After some research, I discovered that Plex had some (pretty decent) support for local media that’s already provided by the Local Media Assets agent. For example, once you know how to name your files, you can rely on this agent to connect image and audio (theme) files to your personal video items in Plex. There is also built-in support for parsing mp4 tag metadata. However, there are some limitations and I thought a custom plugin would help to fill in the gaps.

Feel free to try it out and let me/everyone know if you find it useful - GitHub - mrzhenya/plex-plugins at prod I added a comprehensive README that explains how to use the plugin and how to name the files. In short, additional information could be placed in .info files that should reside alongside with your local media.

Comments to the author should go to this thread - Custom local media agent for parsing metadata from .info files

1 Like
11

I use a combination of Foobar2000 and MP4 Video & Audio Tag Editor to add information to my personal video files to Plex’s data.

This allows me to keep ALL of the metadata included inside the mp4 video file and not have to worry about keeping additional files or manually entering the data into PMS only to have to re-enter it when/if there is a problem with Plex or my collection and need to reinstall.

Foobar2000 metadata
Track = Video Title
@copyright = Studio
Artist = People/Actors (names separated by commas)
Album = Collection (separate multiple ‘collections’ with a comma)
Genre = Genre (seperate multiple ‘genre’s’ with a /)
Date = Date

Attach a “front cover” to the mp4 which will show up in Plex as the Poster.

I’m unable to get Foobar2000 to recognize Plex’s Summary field so I use the MP4 Video Tagger (see above) for the Long Description field:

MP4 Video & Audio Tag Editor
@ldes = Summary

This has worked quite well for me for years and once entered in the video’s metadata, I never have to worry about Plex not recognizing my video or having to re-enter the data into Plex again.

That said, I’ll look into this new project on GitHub and see if it’s any easier or can benefit my Collections beyond what I’m already doing.

12

Yes, that could work as well. Personally, I was never able to parse the long description, which was the most important field for me. Also, mp4 tag date was always parsed as a year, which was a bit disappointing though not a deal breaker. Btw, for image files you can rely on the bundled Local Media Assets agent - multiple posters and banners are supported for a single video title. I also find it useful to add a custom theme mp3 file to shows - it makes the browsing experience more enjoyable.

13

This allows me to keep ALL of the metadata included inside the mp4 video file

The issue here is that not all formats support embedded metadata, as the description states above… given that, I’m suggesting to use an external file (just like the .SRT files that are read on load) to achieve this issue.

Having a plain old basic editor able to edit an external file right next to the media is way more long-term friendly and allows for better transport of media between devices IMO.

1 Like
14

the information I described is ALL parsed by the built-in Plex parser…

How do you tag the background image for Plex to automatically read that image?

15

You can find my recommendations here - GitHub - mrzhenya/plex-plugins at prod . There is also some useful information in the Debugging section.

16

Kindly add these features. Many of the plots are blank

17

Plex have stated that native NFO support (and more) is aimed to come to PMS next year :grin:

3 Likes
19

Excellent! I’m glad they recognized the value of (need for) this feature! Less/no code for us to maintain! :smiley:

tom80H, could you share a reference to the source of this information by any chance?

22

Reference is right there in my post. If you click on the quote, you should see the original post in the fireside chat.
That being said, that post only mentions NFO support in general. Not actually sure if this will also come to local extras (although I have my fingers crossed for this).

23

LOL aahh, that was the reference

They do have a lot on the roadmap - good luck!