Server Version#: 1.18.4.2171 (Linux - CentOS 7)
Player Version#: 4.20.1
Every time my Plex server tries to match movies that are properly organized by correct title indexing(", The" or “, A”) it fails to find the movie. Plex used to do this just fine, but it no longer is able to match them. It works for all my other movies without the/a in the title. It is also able to match if I manually go in, match, search options, and remove the trailing the/a.
Just curious if this is a bug or something changed in the way Plex handles matching now.
“The” or “A” at the end? What movies have “The” at the end of their title?
If you have something names “Great Escape, The” it won’t work as there isn’t a movie named that.
Some recent examples…
Lion King, The… Irishman, The… Farewell, The… Dog’s Journey, A
Now, I know I can name them “The Lion King” and it will work… But, my movies are named by typical title order, the same way you would organize books/movies in a store or library. It keeps the massive directory of media files somewhat organized rather than 50 movies together that are The… something.
The lack of finding metadata is something new though. I have always organized my media like this and Plex was always able to find the metadata no problem, but something in the last year or so broke it.
That is how TMDB / IMDB want them. “The” , “Lion”, “King” , (year).
Remember, “The Lion King” is the proper name of a movie.
If your name is “John A Smith”, do you want your name badge to be “Smith, John A.” in military “Item, 1 each” format or in the friendly format?
I have 56 movies which begin with “The”.
This is the nature of curation.
When PMS displays the movies, “A” and “The” are ignored for sorting purposes to avoid this problem. “The Lion King” will show up in the “L” section.
I use subdirectories from A to Z so, whilst the films still begin with “The”, they are at least in the “L” section (in the case of the “The Lion King” which I find helps.
I want my movies to be named the proper way to name movies, so they show in a file list correctly. Plex isn’t the defacto only way to view my library. Additionally everyone seems to miss the point… it worked fine for the last several years with no issue… until something changed in Plex that caused it to stop finding them.
As I stated before, if I manually remove the A or The from the search it finds the metadata correctly with no issues. As you stated, Plex already does this for its sorting order I don’t see why it can’t just omit the the/a from the search.
If I go to Emby, it uses the same mechanism.
If I go to TMDB, they also list with “The Lion King”.
If I go to TheTVDBm they also list “The Mandalorian”
If I go to IMDB the also list “The Mandalorian”.
I’m not going to debate this further, I’m sorry.
There is an industry convention and it seems all the major sources are following it.
and this if you are on a Mac. it’s only a filename changer (not specific to media and doesn’t look up in any database), but it’s easy to mass remove “, A” from the end and insert "A " at the beginning. It’s got multi-step capability so you can set a step for each one “, A”, “, The” etc etc
Just because a book has the title printed on the cover A Book Tittle, doesn’t mean you don’t organize them Book Title, A. IMDB and all other sources display the title correctly, that doesn’t mean they do so in a library catalog system when sorted alphabetically.
I’m pretty sure this was due to the changes at the TMDB that broke Plex’s metadata a while back anyway (which was fix on the next release).
Finally… I would like to point out it works fine on TV shows named the same way. In fact you can even search the TVDB by “title, the” (https://thetvdb.com/search?query=Mandalorian%2C+the) with no issue. Pretty suspicious for something that is the incorrect way to do things.
@brianara3 We do understand your viewpoint; there is no need to re-explain
However, this doesn’t change the following facts:
Digital TV/Movies have a different naming convention to hardcopy books
Plex follows the digital TV/movie naming convention
I have just checked my calibre (ebook) library and also their help pages. They also recommend the “The” is at the start of the title for any ebook in their collection. Perhaps, given that these libraries are processed by database apps (not humans) prior to being presented to humans, it simply wasn’t necessary to keep the files in a human-friendly naming format anymore. Perhaps I therefore should replace “Digital TV/Movies” with “Digital Media” above,
For what it’s worth, I used to save files with “, the” at the end. However, I changed (many years ago) when I realised that there was a significant percentage of both movies and TV that Plex was not matching. After I changed to the naming format that Plex recommended, my matching became almost perfect.
