Bad matching

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

There is a TV Series from a few years back called ‘Gone’. I have episodes 6 - 12 (seem to have missed first 5).

Now there is a new series called ‘The Gone’, for which I have all 6 episodes of the first season (all that’s available).

You can see where this is heading.

When I add the latter, it simply matches them to the earlier series ‘Gone’ and I am unable to prevent/fix this. I’ve removed ‘The Gone’, done the Plex Dance and added it again and…

Yup, it simply adds it to the wrong series again. So…

How can I prevent this and tell Plex to stop f***g around with my files and simply do what it is told and follow the actual file naming convention of the files which I am pretty sure is correct. ‘The Gone’ is NOT the same as ‘Gone’. Stop trying to be so damn clever and in fact being dumb.

Any ideas, or do I have to rename the series just to stop Plex from f***g up?

2

I’m not able to tell, because you are not disclosing your current naming.

So I can only give you this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/
It contains everything you need to prevent mismatchings.

1 Like
3

I beg to differ. The problem is not my naming scheme as I follow the guidelines (I think correctly) and it works, except in some cases. In particular, where the show title is the same except for e.g. prepended with ‘The’ as in my example. They are 2 entirely different shows, but Plex conflates them as it drops ‘The’ etc when trying to match.

That may be appropriate in some cases, but clearly not in others, which means Plex needs to do some more work on this.

However, the real problem is not the mismatch as I can normally just fix that myself manually, but not in this case. The show ‘Gone’ is already in Plex and correctly matched. I add ‘The Gone’ and Plex matches it to ‘Gone’. They are correctly named, each in their own correct folders, but Plex ignores ‘The’ and thinks they’re the same show which I cannot seem to manually fix.

I could take out ‘Gone’ and I could then manually match ‘The Gone’ to the correct show, but when I then add back ‘Gone’ it would undoubtedly be matched to ‘The Gone’ as it does when added in the opposite order. Once they are mixed like that, how can I split them?

The actual ‘Split’ command does not work and returns an error which I suspect is because it’s trying to split in a way that is not what I want and it is seeing nothing to split. I cannot ‘Fix match’ since that is only possible at the Show level and these are the same show according to Plex. There’s no way to ‘Fix match’ of the individual episodes and assign the errant ones to their correct show.

My problem is less to do with Plex making matching mistakes (which it does, frequently) as I can usually fix each show as required. Plex does need some work on this for sure, but it is user fixable. Unfortunately in this case it is not as I can only fix things per show and Plex has lumped them all together as one show and not provided any tools (that I can see) to allow episodes to be reassigned to their correct show.

If there is a way to do this, pray tell.

Here’s the episode 6 files of both shows:-

…/TVShow/Gone/Season 1/Gone - s01e06 - Family Photo.mp4
…/TVShow/The Gone/Season 01/The Gone - s01e06 - ◁······ (HD).mp4

The episode title of the latter is the system I use when there is no actual title. It’s just text and Plex has NO problem with it in any other of hundreds or episodes so that’s not the problem here. Also, the latter’s Season folder is numbered padded with ‘0’. Again, Plex seems to have no problem with this and in any case, if it did, it would be more likely to cause separation instead of happily merging them all under ‘Season 1’ in the GUI.

So I’m pretty sure the file naming is correct and the metadata I know is correct for each, but Plex is ignoring ‘The’ when matching and once incorrectly matched in this way, how can one separate them into their own correct show?

Only way I can think of is to add the year to the file naming which should work, but is a bodge. Plex should be able to keep separate 2 shows with actually different titles and certainly it needs to provide the tools to correct the situation when it inevitably gets it wrong occasionally.

Or am I simply missing some clever way to split up such erroneously merged shows?

4

Not saying this is the solution for you, or that it should be necessary in this case, but personally I always add the year to my folder naming whenever I think there might be some confusion or ambiguity. (…/TVShow/Gone (2017)/…/…)
I’ve never heard of either of these shows, but I just did a quick search that would suggests they are at least from different years, so maybe that would help?

5

Done it. :slightly_smiling_face:

I did it the other way around as I saw a possibility of that in fact working.

I moved ‘Gone’ out of Plex. That way, I was able to match ‘The Gone’ to the correct show and ensure the show title really was ‘The Gone’ (as ‘The’ is always dropped when importing).

I then moved ‘Gone’ back into Plex and now it recognised that the show title ‘Gone’ did not match the existing ‘The Gone’ and hence it was added as its own Show. So I now correctly have ‘Gone’ and ‘The Gone’.

So in fact the order of adding them was crucial in getting Plex to do the right thing and then normal manual tools could be used to keep everything correct.

The fact remains though that the order should make no difference as we cannot determine the order in which such similarly titled shows are released. If Plex is unable to import correctly in such cases, then it must provide the tools to allow the user to manually correct the problem, without all the dancing around and having to work out an order of import that might mean Plex gets it right.

So for example, allow the Show Title of selected episode(s) to be changed. and that would then move the episode(s) to the specified show.

I realise that Show Title is not stored per episode, but it is known obviously and allowing it to be changed re-assigns the selected episode(s) to that other show. That would have enabled me to fix the problem in mere minutes - and not had to bother anyone here. :slightly_smiling_face:

6

Yes, different years, but I have no idea when another show with a similar title might be released so every show needs to have the year included and if those 2 shows had been released in the same year, then that’s not going to work anyway.

In this case, the Shows do have different titles, so it should not be necessary. It is Plex trying to be too clever and inappropriately dropping the ‘The’ that causes the problem.

Two Shows with the exact same name and released in the same year will be hard for Plex to resolve. That’s why there needs to be a method of manually separating them without all guessing and dancing currently required. Allowing us to change the Show title of selected episodes allows us to simply fix the problem when it occurs.

7

Agreed.

8

Precisely. That’s why it is explicitly recommended in the linked naming guideline.

You can bet that other users are expecting Plex to be clever and be resilient against added or dropped articles and the like.

For this case there is a resolution as well in the naming guidelines: add an ID number from either TheTVDB or TheMovieDB to the show folder name.

9

I’m not making a big criticism of Plex here, but it is a tricky situation to resolve. Adding the year is a good solution when shows have the same title, but should NOT be necessary when the shows actually have different titles.

I fully realise the difficulties of ‘standardising’ names, dropping articles and so on and I do not expect Plex to always get it right. That’s why there needs to be a simple way to manually correct the data when it’s wrong. That’s why we have functions like ‘fix match’ so when Plex gets it wrong, there’s a simple way to fix it.

However in this case, there is no simple fix and I’m suggesting an additional menu option to change the show title for selected episodes as that would be a simple fix to use and as a former database developer myself, I cannot imagine that hard to implement either.

Using Unique IDs is a good solution as long as those UIDs are standard and permanent, but unfortunately TheMovieDB and TheTVDB are neither of those things. They are third party, independent organisations that may disappear tomorrow, so on the whole, IMO not a great way to identify possibly thousands of episodes in ones collection.

However one tries to do it, it WILL go wrong at some time, so better to allow for that by providing a simple fix for when it does.

10

There are still Split and FixMatch in Plex. That is relatively quick, however it only fixes the Plex DB. If you ever want to move the files around or rebuild the DB, you end up doing it again. So, IMHO, it is better to do it the right way from the beginning. And that means adding at least the (year). It catches 97% of all duplicate title cases, current or future.

The ID is only required to distinguish two same-titled items from the same release year. Which is rather a rare case.

11

Except in this case, ‘Split’ and ‘fix match’ did nothing and was not possible, respectively.

The latter point is important here as it would indeed be the solution, if you could apply it to selected tracks. However you can’t. It can only be applied to the entire show and since Plex has already lumped 2 shows into 1, it cannot be used to separate out the 2 shows.

All the solutions you mention are to solve problems when more than one show has the same title, but in this case it is actually different and having made the (understandable) mistake, there should be a way to separate them without having to jump through hoops and renaming stuff.

Having worked out how to do it, I now have 2 shows each with the correct title, so Plex IS able to distinguish between them. Shows with the same title cannot be distinguished without the year, or UID etc. If those measures are not employed, they WILL be merged into the same show. That is not the same as in my case since the show titles are different and there should be no need to mess with any file naming etc. It’s just a question of getting Plex to understand they are different shows and that shouldn’t need any file naming shenanigans as they are already uniquely named.

Can you see there are 2 different issues here?

12

In addition to the above, it seems to me that if the file system can differentiate between the 2 shows, then Plex should also be able to.

Nothing I am saying is a criticism of Plex importing items and getting it wrong as 100% correct would be impossible. All I’m saying is that since importing is a fallible process, Plex needs better tools to enable the user to manually fix any of those issues.

13

You can only split whole shows, yes. But that is the key here.
The merged episodes are already stored in separate show folders. Which means that if you split the whole show, you will get 2 show items, where each will only contain the files from one of the two show folders.
You can then use the Plex media info to determine which is which and perform Fix Match on the right one.

14

Well that would be great, if it worked. The two merged shows with which I was having trouble were each in their own folder (different show titles after all) and the first thing I tried was ‘Split’. However, that just displayed a red error message:-

There was a problem splitting this item apart

and nothing was changed.

I initially thought maybe permissions were the problem, but they were correct, so I assumed that message was because ‘Split’ did not work as I was expecting and as far as Plex was concerned, there was nothing to split so it was unable to do anything, hence the error.

So if ‘Split’ was indeed supposed to do what I was needing, why the error and not working?

BTW, I’m running PMS on Debian and it’s up to date.

15

Most common problem if something fails at the database level is a damaged database file.

Or insufficient access permissions inside the Plex data folder on those files and folder which are used to store the metadata of the affected items.

Or maybe just using the sometimes slightly outdated local web app, instead of the hosted web app to perform the action.

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No other problems to indicate a damaged db and as I said, all permissions were/are correct.

I tend to use the local app, but that automatically updates (if update available) when starting it and there was an update right before tackling this issue.

Since they are now successfully separated I cannot try anything else to test. Just have to see if it happens again. If it does and the local app again fails to ‘Split’ them , I’ll try it using the hosted web app and see.

Most importantly, you have confirmed that ‘Split’ is supposed to do exactly what I was needing. I’m sure I have successfully used it before to do this so that’s what I tried first of all. Just have to see if it happens again.

Thanks for taking the time here.

17

No, the local web app doesn’t. It is only updated when you install a newer server version – IF that server version has indeed a newer version of the web app bundled with it.

Update on start sounds more like the Plex for desktop app (which does look like the web app, but uses a wholly different player engine and has sometimes slightly different behaviour in minor details.)

18

You got me there. Yes, it’s the Plex for Desktop app I use.

I’ll try the others next time I have that problem again.

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