Server Version#: 4.156.0 run on a Synology NAS, DSM 7
I found that some of my movies are half matched, meaning when I filter for unmatched movies, these don’t show up, but in the … menu these have “match” and not “fix match”. What I see in the xml as difference is that in the Video tag
those properly matched have: guid="plex://movie/5f40….
those properly not matched have: guid="local://148…
those half-matched have: guid="tv.plex.agents.none://149….
These are all in the same library, after trying DBRepair and refreshing all metadata.
These are rare videos that are very hard to match, so for a lot of them I tried matching several versions until there is a proper match and sometimes there is no match when eventually I unmatch the last version tried. I suppose this is when movies can stick in this half-matched status.
This happens after you explicitly UNmatch an item. It will stay in this state, even after a new regular library scan.
Therefore, use “Fix Match”, or follow up “Unmatch” always with “Match”.
The problem is that there is indeed no match for these so eventually these should remain unmatched. Is there a way to fully unmatch so it gets back to the state before I first tried to match it?
Thanks. This works some entries. For other entries the over-active agent as soon as I put it back to the library will auto-match something incorrect. Once I unmatch that I’m back at square one.
These are opera or classical concert recordings and documentaries about these that were either released on niche DVDs or aired on TV. So, I guess they could be on IMDB as a lot of similar material actually are, but these are just omitted. I guess I’ll try to add them to TMDB.
Gotcha. Yeah, the niche stuff is really hit or miss on TVDB or TMDB. Sometimes even if it is there, its often incomplete or not updated as new seasons come out. I’ve added a few shows to TMDB to cover just this type of scenario. It’s pretty easy to do and keeps my libraries cleaner.
Given that unmatching these items was done fully intentionally, I wonder if the filter behavior can be really called a bug.
Ususally you un-match an item if you are subsequently supplying your own metadata to it. An item like this is – in a way – not comparable with an actual “not matched” item (i.e. one that was added but has no metadata at all).
I’m not sure I can agree with that. Matched means, to me, that there is an IMDB/TMDB/Plex/ whatever entry matched with this media. Unmatched means that there is no such entry, regardless of metadata being manually entered or not.
If I match and then unmatch, I would expect to get back to the same state where I was before matching. As the name of the operation suggests.
If an Item was never matched, I can still enter whatever metadata I like and it will stay guid="local://…” and fully unmatched. However if the item is once matched and then unmatched then even if there is no metadata added at all the record is still on guid="tv.plex.agents.none://…” and stays half-matched whatever I do (except for matching with an other entry).
If an item was unmatched, in the “…” menu of the movie I see “Match” rather than “Fix Match”. This also suggests, that Plex considers these items unmatched, however, when it comes to filtering, it decides otherwise. Seems like when it is about deciding to show “Match” or “Fix Match” in the menu a different criteria is used than at the filtering.
To me it feels like the “unmatch” operation was incomplete. Usually, it does remove the metadata, the cast, etc. added by the match; however, it does not remove the posters added and it does not put back this guid value to where it was before the matching. I would expect to remove all posters and keep only the local entries (since the item is not matched) and to set back the guid to “local://…”. I’m don’t know what this “tv.plex.agents.none” is supposed to mean, but I think “local://…” should be used all unmatched entries (whether they were matched before or not) while “plex://movie/…” should be the value for matched items.
Actually, it won’t – if an item with a sufficiently similar title eventually has been added to one of the metadata websites. Then Plex server will eventually match an item that has not been explicitly unmatched. And subsequently it may (at least partially) overwrite your manually added metadata.
Which would be undesirable.
That’s why this behavior was added in the first place.
That makes sense. Otherwise, if there is a sufficiently similar title I could unmatch an item and the next time I look at it it would be matched again with that different movie.
So practically, the way to permanently prevent an item from ever being matched is to match and then unmatch it. Matched, never-matched and forced-unmatched are three different states with differences in filtering, possibility of auto-matching, etc… As it seems in the “…” menu “fix match” is shown only for “matched” while in the filtering “unmatched” only filters for those “never-matched“. It would be nice to have these three states differentiated in the filtering too.
At least now I get what’s going on and can try to find out how I can live with that.
Thanks for your kind help.
p.s. Since in the advanced filtering the filter by unmatched status does not work anyway (it always show the unmatched items disregarding whether I select “is true” or “is false”) it could be fixed so that one could filter for all three states separately.
