Today I was setting up Plex with a friend of mine. It was completely new to him. So he ran into some little problems and had a lot of questions to ask.
During our talk I had the idea of a quite little but maybe handy feature which could make it a bit easier to manage the media library.
When you add movies or tv shows to the plex library, the media agents usually do quite a good job in finding the correct meta data depending on how well the original files are named. If you build up your library over a long period of time you get a mismatch every now and then, but it is quite easy to correct that via the plex web interface and doesn’t take a lot of time.
However if you want to set up a new server on another device with the same media files you run into the same naming conflicts again. That means you have to correct all the mismatches at once which is a little bit frustrating and can take you a lot of time.
That happened to me when I was moving my library from my iMac (which I used for plex many years) to my new Diskstation. There were so many movie files that weren’t matched correctly or not matched at all.
So I took my time correcting the mismatches manually and gave the files on my harddrive a filename that matched the name of the movie title that the plex media agent suggested. This was quite a bit of work. But after that I just needed to refresh my library, plex recognized the name and all the files were matched correctly on the first try.
So basically my idea is that if plex can’t match a file and you correct that with the plex web interface, plex could simultaneously change the name of the file on the harddrive.
That way the library would be much more organized and it would be easier to start from scratch with plex if you need to.
I just want to mention that I am from Germany and sometimes it’s a little hard for me to express my thoughts in English. But I hope you understand what I mean
Thanks in advance! I am looking forward to this feature!
This has been requested several times before. Plex has a policy to not modify the original media files under any circumstance, so getting a built-in Plex feature is highly unlikely. A plug in would be possible, but it will have to be made by a 3rd party.
Well since I posted that feature request of course I have to defend it and tend to see things a bit differently. So please don’t be mad at me if I don’t agree with you completely.
I understand that they have this policy and can imagine why they have it as well.
But in this case the media itself wouldn’t be affected. The content wouldn’t change, just the name. Which I think could definetly improve the user experience (even if just slightly) and make it easier to organize the media files. And of course it could be an optional feature. So people wouldn’t be forced to use this.
Ugh. The “P” word again. The ultimate stopping point for progress and thinking.
Do keep in mind that someone human created that “policy” at some point with the information that person or multiple people had at that time and that available information or the interpretation and technical possibilities can change over time.
While I do agree that Plex randomly changing file names or even moving files is a really, really bad idea, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have a setting somewhere like “ask to rename files on mismatch/changes” where you can set if you want to be asked if Plex should change a file name or folder name if the respective information in the Plex database is manually modified so that the filename better represents the content in Plex’ view.
Now, I probably wouldn’t be using it since I use the nfo agent and create my nfo files so that I don’t run into these issues and also that I have my data if I should switch away from Plex (I do have an Emby server running off the same nfo files right now - I needed it once when a Plex update broke transcoding of some files), but I can see how that feature could be beneficial to some Plex users to help name their files correctly.
