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.)
