Server Version#: 1.29.1.6316
Player Version#: N/A
Media (video) is added and tags for directors, etc. are added automatically, but in several cases which should be a single unique tag has multiple versions so filtering by director, etc. is made useless.
Example: Director tag has “David Lynch” value, but there are MULTIPLE “David Lynch” tags in the db apparently, so while all the movies in the collection by the SAME David Lynch (this one: David Lynch - IMDb)) they are split across multiple conflicting "David Lynch"es and it appears to be IMPOSSIBLE to fix the mis-tagging yourself, so searching or filtering by director is effectively broken.
Is there any way to either a) fix the wrongly-tagged content or b) clean up the invalid content in the db?
Refresh the metadata for the entire library.
So others can try to replicate the problem, what are two or three movies with different David Lynch tags?
Thanks – will attempt to refresh all the metadata and report back status.
As the example, on my local server looking at the links for the different “David Lynch” entries in the Director filter drop-down are identical except for the director ID (as one might expect):
http://127.0.0.1:32400/web/index.html#!/media/...&key=%2Flibrary%2Fsections%2F1%2Fall%3Ftype%3D1%26sort%3DtitleSort%26director%3D110815
http://127.0.0.1:32400/web/index.html#!/media/...&key=%2Flibrary%2Fsections%2F1%2Fall%3Ftype%3D1%26sort%3DtitleSort%26director%3D5318
Example movies (for David Lynch) include:
Blue Velvet, Dune, Lost Highway are all associated with the first ID while EraserHead is associated to the second one … but David is by no means the only example. There a many, many examples of this behavior, starting with:
- Adam Robitel (entries from the Escape Room series)
- Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men, Klute vs. The Pelican Brief, Presumed Innocent)
- Alan Parker (Life of David Gale, Pink Floyd’s The Wall vs. Angel Heart)
- Alejandro Amenabar (Abre Los Ojos vs. The Others)
- Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High vs. Natl’ Lampoon’s European Vacation)
… etc. etc.
Update: After full refresh of all metadata, a bit of good and bad.
First, the good:
At first blush, it appears that many of the duplicate Director tags have been resolved. I believe the places where there are still dupes are cases where the tags were manually edited (and therefore the metadata was locked from update), so I should be able to resolve these 1-offs through direct action (clearing the metadata locks and forcing refresh for the specific file(s)).
The bad:
I have many many auto-playlists which use the director or actor tags, etc. Most of these appear to now be broken (empty) because the underlying tag IDs have apparently changed with the refresh, so I have to fix/rebuild these playlists, etc. Do-able, but it then begs asking:
- Any ideas as the cause of this confusion/corruption in the db (i.e. not using existing tags when adding media)?
- How often might I need to rebuild like this? Would be disappointed if I have to keep rebuilding playlists, etc. due to this behavior
Found another (and much worse) “bad” which came from refreshing all the metadata. Plex has re-merged all the movies which I’ve gone through the pains to split apart.
Have I mentioned how much I HATE that feature?
Now I have to go through the entire collection and fix all the stupid merging of movies again due to this bad behavior
Plex devs PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give us a way to turn this horrible feature off!
I think we need to start by understanding why these items are merging, are they the same movie? if they are and are just different cuts of the movie I would recommend tagging them as editions, see: https://support.plex.tv/articles/multiple-editions/
