Basically I am using Plex to house all my home videos and of course I try to use the name of the file as best I can to include organizing information like year, date or main topic of the content “Birthday” or something like that, but is there a way to put the information inside of the video like as a tag or comment or some area where plex will be able to grab that data, so that when I search in plex “Uncle Jim” every video that I have written that in will show up? I cant put all of the information in the title name as it would just be too long. And without this ability its impossible to find anything. 
Any help or suggestions here would be greatly appreciated!!
You can configure Plex to use the embedded metadata of your home videos. I have e.g. tagged my family videos with their respective dates (release date), involved family members (cast) and collections (album ->e.g. X-Mas, Birthday, Vacation…) with that I can sort and filter my home videos like other libraries. You can also include a description but that’ll only be displayed,not used for sorting/filtering.
IIRC this will only work with mp4/m4v/mov containers.
Thank you for your response!! Where are you doing this meta data input? Are you doing on the PLEX server after the video is already viewable in your plex library? Or before on the actual content?
My concern with doing it within PLEX itself is that I have had a couple times already where I have had to rebuild my library due to some corruption in PLEX and when I rebuilt it any video that I had done manual work on like rematching or updating posters or backgrounds was lost. It seems when you make the change on PLEX it doesn’t embed it back onto the original file. So doing all this labeling on my home videos will be an immense amount of work and I dont want to lose it if I end up needing to rebuild my PLEX… But if it was on the original content, and PLEX would pull it from there somehow then it would work perfectly… Is this what youre doing?
Thoughts?
When it comes to embedding metadata into your files, I’m using an external app while preparing my files (before adding them to Plex). I’m not sure if Plex will pick up changes to the embedded metadata after adding the file to a library (though that should be a relatively simple check 
).
I’m on a Mac, using an app called Subler. If I remember correctly, mp3tag should be able to do the same on Windows (despite the name).
Edit: you’re right, Plex will not modify your source files. That includes it won’t write metadata changes into your files.
Wow thank you!
So when you use this software before putting into your plex, you are adding information like “uncle Bill” to the file itself, and once you add that file to plex, it can then be searched in PLEX when you type in uncle Bill or something of the like? If so that is the exactly solution im looking for!
Correct.
Example:
| Tag | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | Summer Vacation 2017 |
| Description | Family vacation in France w/ trips to … |
| Release Date | 2017-07-18 |
| Album | Vacations |
| Cast | [Mom], [Dad], [Kid 1], [Kid 2], [Uncle Bill] |
| Director | [Me] |
Im getting excited! I hope this works! haha Where would you put descriptors like “Boat” “Yosemite” “road trip”, so that Plex would be able to search those as well?
I’m not sure that’s possible.
You might want to experiment a bit with what tags in a file end up where in Plex and check if you can e.g. assign those tags as Label so you can filter them.
So far Im not having any luck with putting it other descriptors. I do have the “actors” working so thats nice, but cant find a place to put other descriptors where plex will search. Do you by chance know all of the fields that Plex does actually search so that maybe I can just repurpose one of those?
My “other video” type library will pick up the following tags:
| Subler Tag | Plex Tag | Remark |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Title | |
| Sort Title | Sort Title | |
| Release Date | Originally Available | formatted as YYYY-MM-DD
|
| Rating | Content Rating | |
| Studio | Studio | |
| Long Description | Summary | |
| Directors | Directors | * |
| Genres | Genres | * |
| Screenwriters | Writers | * |
| Album | Collections | * |
(*) → comma separated input will be split in different tags
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
