Recently I was trying to solve a duplicate genre issue I was having, and I think I’ve figured out the culprit.
I noticed that my embedded tags would count as different tags depending on whether it was alphabetically the first tag on a particular video or not, leading me to believe that Plex might have a bug where it includes a leading space when parsing embedded tags beyond the first… The tags aren’t displayed with a leading space in the Plex UI so it’s getting taken care of at some point, but I did some testing which corroborated the idea that there’s something not quite right behind the curtain.
Since my videos with embedded genre tags are in their own separate library that’ll only have embedded genre tags, I was able to solve my duplicates problem by adding an embedded dummy genre to my videos that’d always be first alphabetically (I went with “0”), which worked like a charm. Then I tested the theory further by removing the “0” genre from one of my videos to see if a duplicate genre tag would return, and sure enough it did. This solution won’t make them match up with non-embedded genre tags which don’t have a leading space though.
This issue is probably why people commonly believe that Plex simply counts embedded tags separately from non-embedded ones, so I tested this by applying a single embedded genre tag to a video, and it matched up flawlessly with the non-embedded version of the tag.
As a total aside, I also discovered that Plex doesn’t like using local metadata from files that end in .MP4 (as opposed to .mp4)… it’ll get the title, but embedded artwork, actors, genres, etc. seem like a no-go. An easy enough fix to rename, rescan, and refresh though.
Server Version#: 1.23.3.4707
EDIT: Fixed in a recent update, hooray!
