Hey Plex friends. I have a unique library of video files, and so far, it’s been largely unusable via Plex. These aren’t movies or tv shows that will show up in a name-matching repo somewhere. They’re recordings of Drum Corps International World Championships performances.
My files are not named consistently, so I’ll be renaming them all, and I want to get to them to work the best I can within the Plex convention.
Ideally, the files would know about the following info:
Year
Group Name
Show Name
Placement (this could go, but I’d reaaaaly like to capture it somewhere.)
I’ve tried treating them as “Other Videos”, but it seems like the year and placement would have to be part of the title at that point. And I can use a collection to keep them in a year grouping in this case. Still a little wonky.
I’ve tried treating them as TV shows with the year as a season and episode as placement. “s1994e01-Blue Devils-My Spanish Heart.mp4”. That does split them by year, but doesn’t pickup the group name or show name. In this case, It would be awesome if the Plex Title was “Blue Devils - My Spanish Heart”. The season and episode show up as “1994 - Episode 1” which fits year and placement nicely.
Seems like treating them as TV gets me closest. Is there some way I could name the files so that “Blue Devils-My Spanish Heart” showed up as the Plex title automatically? Barring that, is my best option to rename files with s1994e01-whatever.ext, and then edit the title of each movie in Plex? (ugh…I have thousands…but will do it if that’s the way).
Any other ideas on how to use Plex to organize these videos?
Thanks very much. This is very helpful. I’ve added SxxExx to a few test files, and the edited the Title in Plex, and it seems to be the best solution. (After I set the Agent for the library, of course). I’ll do a few full seasons worth, and see how things look.
You’ll probably find, like I did, it’s easier to simply edit the item.
If you choose to make this harder than it needs to be - make sure Local Media Assets is the ONLY other Agent in Personal Media and if there are more Agents (for some reason) make sure LMA is above the others.
Do NOT, under any circumstances move LMA to the top slot under any other tab than Personal Media in Shows or Movies.
The overwhelming majority of Plex users want this - not something else:
Unless, of course, you want to make the use of mp4 files impossible… for some reason.
Also, if it hasn’t been mentioned - it isn’t ‘necessary’ to create another Library for these things. ‘Personal Media’ means Plex won’t irritate you while you edit. It does make it easier to ‘Exclude/Include’ a library dedicated to to boom and toots (tooted in my youth - Drum and Bugle) from other users - and it’s good way to keep ‘trials and testing’ in house and not for all to see.
I find that very short-sighted. As soon as your plex server craps out, you’ll lose all your metadata edits. If those metadata are stored directly in the media files, you can easily rebuild your plex data base.
And if you happen to use other media players as well, those can benefit as well from the embedded metadata.
I’ve done one season with internal Plex tags via a TV Shows library and I like the outcome, especially that the Episode number serves as a finals placement indicator.
Now I’ll do a season with internal mp4 tags, and see how that turns out. I do like that this would more permanent, but also not all of my files are mp4.
Thanks for all the insight on different methods. I’ll report my findings.
Been playing with this since my changes were still being blown away by Plex. Seems like if I disable LMA on the TV Shows agents tab, it’ll leave my changes alone. But then I’ve made mp4 tags useless everywhere on my server for TV shows. Hrmm… I’ll try turning it back on, and editing the mp4 tags and see where that takes me.
Juice did not advise turning the LMA off. He just said that you want to not drag it into the top position.
It will still work in the last position, because a show which is matched with the ‘Personal Media Shows’ agent doesn’t get any other metadata. So even if the LMA is the last one, it is the only agent which is able to supply any metadata.
Thank you. I’ll try that again. I did have it not at the top, and enabled, and it was still replacing my plex edits. I’m sure I’m missing something, so I’ll play with it a bit.
The library must have ‘Personal Media Shows’ as its default agent (recommended).
Or at least the show must have been matched with this agent.
Because otherwise, your show is “unmatched” – which makes Plex try to match it again at every library update – which in turn leads to the loss of (most) manually added metadata.
Whether your show is unmatched or not, you can see whether the menu item that appears at the top level of the show is named “Match” or “Fix Match”.
“Fix Match” only appears on a “matched” item.
I thought I made it clear the Personal Media Agent must be engaged and explained how to do it, but… let’s just make sure we understand that and make it happen before any more edits are sent to the great beyond <— the exact reason we do this <—and Plex will be relentless in this regard unless we tell it TO BACK OFF!..lol
@JuiceWSA You did, and I then got confused in all the settings. Sorry about that.
I now have LMA enabled, and demoted to the last active option on all tabs under Movies and Shows. I will expect my in-Plex edits to stay now, even if I “refresh metadata”, etc. My current workflow is: add sXXXXeXX to the filename and once it shows up in the plex season, changing the Plex-Title to what I want.
In the long run, I do like the idea of having info in the file’s own metadata, but 1) I can’t seem to find a good way to edit mp4 metadata on a Mac yet and 2) The majority of my files are not mp4.
My next steps: I’ll do a few season with my workflow and use the system normally for a few days to make sure I’ve got things setup right, and then go ahead with the rest.
Here is some follow up on our discussion. Thanks again for talking me through the options.
First, the TV organization is going to work out just fine. Definitely the best way to do this particular collection. In each “season” I have main performances which I use e01-e99 for, specials which i use e101-199 for, and high-cam angles, which I use e201-299 for, etc. I also have a few versions of some main performances which are worth keeping. I’m figuring out how those get ordered, but having plex know they’re the same episode is cool.
I first cataloged a few seasons by adding them to plex, and editing the plex item. To test fragility, I tried different things to force plex to blow away my changes. As I’ve been warned here, it didn’t take much. Moving the file out and in to the library definitely caused my changes to be deleted, and that’s something I could see happening.
I was able find a good tool for editing mp4 tags on mac (Amvidia Tag Editor). After processing a few seasons this way and testing fragility, I chose this as my way to move forward.
My flow is:
Add s2013e001 etc to files for a season
Open files in Amvidia, and add the tags I want for the title
Add season to Plex library folder.
(also possibly convert some .avi files to mp4 files with handbrake while I go)
Now I just have 30 or so more seasons to go through, and my files will actually be usable! Thanks very much for the help in understanding this.
ps…I did a few tag writing tests to see what Plex was actually reading from the mp4 file. It’s using so few fields! Seems like Plex could do a lot with these tags someday.
