It feels like Plex is trying to get into the streaming game with everyone else. I don’t blame them for wanting that revenue stream, but they need to pay attention to their users. I use Plex to manage my local media. That’s it.
Plex works very well overall, but this failure to gracefully handle local metadata has been a large pain point for me. In particular, I would like to be able to have the Episode Titles that I add for my very obscure miniseries (work-out videos, art instruction videos, etc) to actually persist. Even if Plex would stop overwriting/erasing my custom edited episode titles whenever I scan my files, that would be a small step in the right direction.
I believe you missed the focus of this particular feature suggestion which is aiming at local extras and their naming.
There’s an existing feature suggestion to derive the episode title from the episode file names which is covering what you’ve been describing. For now, embedded metadata might be a more straightforward approach for your use case.
Would local metadata not be able to contain episode titles? If I could set the title in the metadata, I wouldn’t need to rely on the title being parsed correctly from the file name.
Also, some titles contain characters that are not always filesystem friendly (ampersand, quotes, slashes) and metadata files would be a more reliable way to handle them.
I’ve moved this into an own thread… going off-topic will occasionally derail those suggestion threads.
You can configure your library to prefer embedded metadata. In that case Plex will look for embedded tags in your files. This works for mp4/m4v/mov files – however not for mkv or other containers.
This is specifically not about metadata files – but embedded metadata.
Using metadata files (e.g. .nfo files) is covered in yet another feature suggestion.
You can coax Plex into using your own episode titles under these circumstances:
your videos must use the mp4/m4v container format
the episode titles must be embedded into the containers as meta tags
the library must have “Prefer local metatags” enabled (if the library is still using the old metadata agent, you must instead move “Local Media Assets” into the top position under the Agents preferences)
Keep in mind that this may also have an unwanted effect on your “regular” series, where you might not want Plex to use the embedded meta tags.
If you use a separate library for your “custom” content, you can define different metadata options for this library.
Otherwise you’ll have to check your regular series content for embedded meta tags and remove them.
