Custom Show's Metadata Keeps Getting Overwritten

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#: 4.125.1
Player Version#:

For the past two years I have been saving my Church’s sermons to my NAS and adding them to the TV Shows library with custom posters, descriptions, release dates, etc. All of the metadata has been “locked” within the GUI.

For almost the entire time I’ve been doing this, the custom posters I’ve been uploading as image files have, for unknown reasons, disappeared from many episodes…they aren’t replaced, they just show as black. I can re-add them and have but it doesn’t prevent them from eventually disappearing.

Today, after coming back from a long weekend, I found that the entire 2 seasons I’ve added have been identified as some Chinese language show and all of the metadata I have been adding over the past 1-2 years is gone!?!?

What’s going on? What can I do to prevent this? Very frustrated right now…that’s a lot of wasted energy.

2
  1. you need to explicitly “Unmatch” items if they cannot be matched, and you want to supply custom metadata.
  2. you need to disable “Empty trash automatically after every scan” in your Server - Library
    settings, if your NAS is spinning down its platters when idle.
    Leaving this enabled has been most likely the cause of your data loss.
  3. Don’t use the “poster upload” feature. Instead, store the posters suitably named directly beside your video files. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220717-local-media-assets-tv-shows/
  4. if your files use the mp4 container format, consider embedding the metadata directly into them as meta tags. This can save you a ton of time in the case of a database loss or rebuild of the collection.
3

Thanks for the tips and I have unmatched and will work to redo some of the damage. FYI, the auto empty trash setting is already disabled.

However, if the features I’ve been using aren’t reliable, they shouldn’t even be available. Why introduce something that doesn’t work or if there’s already a way to do it? It’s been a complete waste of time!

4

You know, if the best practice is to embed the metadate into the file, why doesn’t Plex just do that when editing the data in the UI or at least make it an option? Rather than having multiple ways of storing metadata, consolidate to the best practice.

5

Plex never touches your media files (except when you enable “deletion”).
There’s too much which can go sideways, particularly when Plex doesn’t even read all of the meta tags.

6

If other applications can do it safely. Why can’t Plex? It should be an options at the very least and I for sure think that unreliable features should either be fixed or removed. It’s just another cause of friction.