Does the new Plex Movie Scanner have backward compatiblity with old IMDB id format?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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This is a question about filenaming using the new movie scanner/agent vs the old one?

The old one supported a format like this:

Movie (Year) - tt12345678.mp4

I have thousands of files named as such and have my radarr set to this. I just went to the movie naming page to find this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/

and apparently the new IMDB format is this:

Batman Begins (2005) {imdb-tt0372784}.mp4

So my question is, does the new Plex scanner still have support for the old IMDB format? or will it just ignore anything not in curly braces? I’m not looking forward to renaming thousands of files (and having Plex rescan, rematch, fix match, etc).

Secondly, the old scanner ignored anything in [TEXT][Surround] brackets. This was nice because I could throw custom formats from Radarr in here without it affecting matching. Is this still supported?

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I’m not a dev, but my understanding is that the scanner should watch for any IMDB tt’s in the file. Also, brackets are generally ignored, but if tt’s are placed in square brackets, they aren’t ignored, they’ll be picked up as part of the new scanner. Here’s a reply from a dev (Chuck) that confirms the square brackets work for IMDB data, so I suspect it works without brackets too.

IMO I’d purposely do a test library, where you pick a file that often gets mismatched, add the tt info to the name, and see if the new scanner picks it up. My guess is that it will.

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It did? Are you sure?

I don’t think the old one parsed IMDB IDs from filenames like that. It did parse /tt[0-9]+/ from matching .nfo files though.

I DO think the new one will parse a bare ttNNNNNN in a filename.

Filename: “Terminator - tt0103064.mkv”
New scanner/agent: “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (correct)
Old scanner/agent: no match.

Yes.

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The old movie scanner required the tt entry to be in a .nfo file.
The new scanner is much more liberal. If it’s a valid ID number, it will be used.

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@Volts @ChuckPa

I’m think the old scanner used it, and I thought I remember seeing it in some official Plex documentation but maybe not. There was a top Reddit post recommending doing this and this thread: Plex server to look for a .plexmatch file when matching a show/movie

So another question:

What if I were to include the TMDB # in addition to the IMDB?

Would that lead to better matching (ie. fallback for when a title doesn’t exist on IMDB)?

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Maybe it does or did? I would treat @OttoKerner as a better source of information than me!

But I don’t see that in the old scanner’s Python code, I never saw it working, and it doesn’t work when I test right now.

Things have changed over time. I might be missing it, or the scanner may have changed.

No matter! The new scanner is double-plus good.

A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.

Don’t do work you don’t need to do. There’s no guarantee you would be improving anything. Heck, it could make things worse. At minimum your filenames will be ugly.

If you encounter a problematic movie, or one with no IMDB ID, troubleshoot or change it to TMDB at that time.

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