Configure PLEX to use my folder name as the movie name instead of getting name from IMDB?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Hi. I would like to ask if there is any option to let PLEX use my folder name as the name of the movie that I’m adding to the server, instead of getting the name from IMDB.

For example for this movie:

The folder where I have put the movie has this name: “Mission Impossible 6 (2018)”, and the movie file name is “Mission Impossible 6 (2018).mkv”, but PLEX will use " Mission: Impossible - Fallout" or something similar. This is a very annoying issue for me because I loss the enumeration ordering for any movie saga when navigating through my PLEX server.

Could I fix this without specifying the custom title on the MKV metadata?. That is not a viable option for me since I should remultiplex more than 5.000 of movie files… and some of them can’t be multiplexed as MKV format.

I could cheat the .nfo file to specify the custom movie title?, that would be viable for me because with a script I could programaticaly do the job (the above alternative too, but it would be a waste of disk read/write operations).

Thanks in advance for any help.

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You can click the “edit” icon next to the movie and change the title.

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Thanks, but I’m looking for a possible solution that could be achieved programmatically (like editing the .nfo file, or something else). I don’t have enough time to spent for clicking the “edit” icon to manually write the custom title name for thousands of movies.

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It also requires clicking the edit button but you can edit the sort title and have that be MI6 if you want. Then they’ll all show in order and with the correct title.

A collection will show correctly too as it sorts by release date.

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Maybe you can configure this to do it for you?

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Sorry for the delay.

I appreciate the help, but this solution didn’t helped me. If I understood good the usage, then the complexity whit that script is that I must write in a plain text file (a .yml file and following specific syntax rules) the name of each movie as they are currently shown in Plex server in order to change their names, and also the rest of fields like year and so. This goes away from what I pretend to do, which should be simpler.

Maybe with Plex SQLite.exe can I do the trick simpler?. I just want every movie in my database to have the movie filename as title (without the file extension). Since every movie in a database is linked to the full movie file path, I think it should be possible to update metadata programmatically in the way I want using Plex SQLite.exe, but I don’t have enough experience with it and with LINQ in general.

Someone could guide me with that?.

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There are already two built-in solutions in Plex for cases like this:

  1. edit the “sort title” of each movie which is part of a “universe”/“saga”/whatever
    Make the sort titles identical, except append either the release year or a simple numercial at the and.
    Result: all movies of a saga appear together and in the right order when browsing your library, sorted by “movie title, ascending”. Without all the clutter in the title.

  2. Collections https://support.plex.tv/articles/201273953-collections/
    Add all movies of a “saga” into a collection. (this might even happen automatically, if these are direct sequels).
    Edit the collection and set its sorting mode to “release year”.
    When you enter the collection, all movies will be in order of release.
    You can choose to have only one poster in your library to represent all movies in the collection.

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Yes but I have more than 1.000 titles that are part of their collections, If there is some way to programmatically do that…

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Assuming you are using a supported container you could use MP3 tags “file name to tag” feature to convert the file name of the file to a metadata tag (title) and then update all of your files programatically.

Then, turn on then prefer local metadata setting for your libraries and Plex should use the title metadata saved in the file.

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I didn’t understood this:

A feature of exactly what?. I don’t get it. I know the MP3 file format container has a metadata field for title (in id3v2 and that), but I think you are telling me a complete different thing.

I’m not sure if what do you mean is to update the ‘title’ metadata field for every mkv file for example?. If that is the case then it would be easy to programmatically do it with mkvtoolnix’s command-line utils, but that approach is an overkill considering a user like me has tons of terabytes of movie files to read and re-write on disk just to update the mkv metadata for each one.

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A misunderstanding. He meant Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)
You can embed the name of the desired collection into the Album meta tag.
But this solution only works for mp4/m4v files.

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Thanks @OttoKerner thats exactly what I meant but mp3tag actually does support mkv files:

@CSG1986 you can use the filename to tag feature to batch edit the metadata and then have Plex read local metadata:

https://help.mp3tag.de/main_converter.html#ftt

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I’m not sure there’s any other way to do what you want. We’ve given you a few solutions. I suppose as a last resort you could try Plex’s folder view but I don’t think all clients support it.

A batch edit of your files won’t take that long. If you’re not willing to give it a go let us know what other method you find so someone else can benefit.

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That is unfortunately of no use in Plex.

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I appreciate the help offered to me, but unfortunately the given solutions are not viable solutions for me.

I can’t apply a kind of add/update file metadata solution that in my case implies to re-write about 32 Terabytes of video files (and anyways as per @OttoKerner’s comment it seems will not work with mkv for plex). It is an overkill, and inflexible solution to title fixes or modifications.

I can’t apply a solution that consists on manually editing fields for specific movies (or just only those that are part of a collections) in the plex web app, because there are thousands of movies. I can’t try to automate this task either, which maybe would be possible with a lot of effort developing a kind of mouse macro with OCR techniques, but it could take about a minimum of 10~15 seconds per movie so it’s a pain and a waste of time. It would take whole days in total just to do a full title update once on the server.

I need some kind of solution different than those.

If Plex adds support for specific fields in the .nfo file that Plex reads, let’s say “title=MY MOVIE TITLE”, it would be perfect. But Plex does not support that, or so I think. That would be programmatically easy to generate that file for every movie folder, with very low space usage, and easy to maintain it updated.

It would be really genius if Plex in general could add support via the .nfo file to override some more things appart from the movie title id for IMDB and that, which is very useful, but it feels incomplete if the .nfo only can serve us for forcing the movie title id. Maybe it could let the users to force other things, like the title, title sort, year, etc by adding support for fields in the format name=value.

In fact my .nfo file contents looks like this:

# The content of this file is used by Plex 
# to identify the movie title.

IMDB Id=tt0133093
TMDB Id=N/A
TVDB Id=N/A

And I know it is totally unnecessary to write comment lines and things like field_name=value syntax haha, Plex does not parse the content in that way and I could remove absolutely everything except the IMDB title id and it will work, but I really like aesthetically how it looks with that syntax.

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Another very good and already implemented solution would be using the program ‘Plex SQLite’ that ships in the Plex install directory.

I’m able to edit and update the title for any movie with Plex SQLite, but I can’t manage to develop a program or script to automate this for every movie in my drive, because I can’t find the relationship between some fields of the tables.

What I found is that the ‘title’ and ‘title_sort’ columns are in one table called ‘metadata_items’, but the full path of the movies are in other different table called ‘media_parts’, and I can’t find anything to link them. I mean I can’t find a movie file identifier shared between those two tables. So I can’t programmatically identify which row corresponds to which row between those two tables.

Using the Plex SQLite program would be the optimal and most functional and flexible solution for my needs, that’s why I keep this thread open, hoping that someone with experience could show me an example of how to find the corresponding “title” or “title_sort” field knowing only the full name / path of the movie file

@moderators:
Am I doing well, or perhaps the right thing to do would be to open a new thread to request this kind of guidance on using Plex SQLite?

Thanks for read.

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