In the past I’m sure that Plex has presented me with a selection of posters to choose from, but I haven’t see it find more than one poster in months. I’ve got each of the agents for both movies and TV set up with multiple sources selected. The libraries are configured to use the Plex Movie and Plex TV Series scanners and agents. with the language preferences set to english
When I look at posters for movies at any of these websites, they almost always have multiple posters to choose from, yet Plex rarely manages to return more than one. I’m sure that Plex has returned more than a single poster per film/episode in the past, so something has changed to restrict it this way.
Can anyone please tell me how to fix this (other than by manually assigning posters, which I usually end up doing)? At the very least, it is possible to reset the agent settings to default without resetting everything else so that I can see if that fixes it?
I’m still having this problem, but I’ve noticed that it’s also preventing Plex from finding, or at least displaying, any cast information for most or all newly-added movies.
I’ve found this thread [HowTo] Reset metadata agent preferences to defaults and whack caches which says that it’s only for legacy agents, but I’m using “Plex Movie” as scanner and agent in the library settings, rather than the “(Legacy)” versions. However, in the PMS global Agents settings the three “additional agents” explicitly include the legacy version of Plex Movie, so it’s unclear to me whether the instructions in that thread will work or not.
Can anyone either confirm that the procedure in the link above will work for the newer agents, or alternatively link to a procedure which does?
Thanks again.
Edit:
I’ve found that using Fix Match and then selecting the first returned result (without using the advanced search) is actually filling out all of the missing metadata. How can I get this behaviour to happen automatically when the movies are added to the library, like it used to? Additionally, “Refresh Metadata” does nothing for this problem.
If no-one can answer those questions, how about some way to apply “Fix Match” to multiple movies at once? I’d rather not have to check through all my movies by hand and then apply the fix individually.
Also, to clarify: the library has already been updated to use the new agent, and my movie filenames are all in the “name (year).ext” format, having mostly been recorded from terrestrial broadcasts through an HDHomeRun tuner.
TV shows
If you are using the “Plex TV Series” agent, you can optionally include the TMDB or TVDB show ID in the folder name to improve matching. If you choose to do that, it must be inside curly braces: ShowName (2020) {tvdb-123456} or ShowName (2020) {tmdb-123456} where 123456 is the show ID. Movies
If using the (non-“legacy”) Plex Movie agent available in Plex Media Server v1.20.1 and newer, you can also include the IMDb or TheMovieDB ID number in curly braces to help match the movie. It must follow the form {[source]-[id]} .
The file names aren’t the problem: I didn’t change them before I used Fix Match to successfully download the metadata. The problem seems to be that Plex is doing the bare minimum of matching/downloading when the movie is first detected.
When I add a new movie, Plex finds the correct name, a very brief summary (usually a single sentence), release date, genres, background image and a single variant of the poster. All other metadata and extras are missing. After I run Fix Match, all of this missing content is correctly downloaded.
I haven’t been able to determine where the summary text has been retrieved from. It doesn’t match what’s found on IMDB, TVDB or TheMovieDB. It does exist in a number of places online, according to a quick googling, but I didn’t see any that Plex uses as sources.
I think that Plex is using some source for very basic data, which it’s successfully matching based on the file name, but for some reason it doesn’t appear to run the more comprehensive match automatically. I don’t know whether this is because I’ve mangled the agent settings, which is why I want to reset them to defaults. That said, I read in Movie extras not being seen (new Plex Movie agent) - #2 by tom80H that the new scanner/agent doesn’t use the system-wide settings and is configured through the library’s advanced settings instead. These settings don’t contain the same options as the general settings do (it seems to boil down to simply choosing the scanner and agent from a drop-down list) so I doubt that there’s anything I could change there to modify this behaviour.
I’ve turned logging on so I’ll see if I can make any sense out of them after another movie gets added to the library.
(Edit: I just had a thought that the very limited data Plex is currently finding is probably coming from the movie’s entry in the TV guide.)
Ok then, very strange I have no issue with new scanners. However I created New Libraries with the new Scanners and deleted the old Libraries, which seems to be same as yourself.
I have found using the ID in the naming resolves and lack of Metadata
I’ve just done a test by renaming a file with the IMDB tag and rescanning the library and it has matched the file correctly, as you said it would. However, this isn’t all that convenient for me unless I can get the DVR to include the tag in the filename when it records something. I can’t see any option to change the file name’s format in the DVR settings in Plex. I’d rather that Plex just work as advertised instead of requiring me to set up some external process to scan my library every so often and rename the files on the server.
(Edit: I’ve also just confirmed that the same problem exists for TV shows.)
I never suggested it was convenient, it was the solution. Maybe there is a renaming app that will work with your OS that quickly adds the ID in the renaming process
Yeah, there may be, though since I’m running Plex on my TrueNAS server, it’s probably beyond me. I’d really like to get some feedback from the devs on an official solution.
This might be the clue as to why it’s happening. I believe that DVR’d content is tied to the DVR guide metadata until it’s ‘disassociated’ from it. Then the content would be subject to the Plex movie/tv scanner for metadata. I remember seeing the opposite situation on the Plex forums where a recording had DVR metadata then became disassociated from ‘DVR Content’ and could not get Movie/TV Scanner metadata.
@OttoKerner would probably be someone to ask about this situation.
