Hi,
I’ve searched everywhere, and I cant find out how to do this. It seems like a simple thing -
All my films are in the format FILM_NAME.YEAR.EXT
PLEX is expecting the film in the format FILM NAME (YEAR).EXT
Or at least the agents that do the meta data matching expects that format. Plex itself finds the films, and shows the correct year. But the meta agents have all been failing when it finds a new film. When I go in to “match”, the agent lists the film as FILM NAME YEAR, and the year field empty - and cant find a match
When I manually fix the year, and remove it from the filmname field, it works fine.
Now, this USED to work, it seems to have broken after an update.
Any ideas? Thanks.
The problem is that you’re not following the naming convention. If you correctly name the files, manually or automatically through something like Filebot, then your problem will go away.
Thanks for the reply, but I thought my original post was clear. The problem is not so much with Plex, but the meta agents
I know about Plex’s naming convention, but as Plex itself finds the film names (and gets the year right), the agents should as well.
My point is that this used to work, but it doesn’t now, and I don’t understand why. You should be able to define the file format anyway.
My server is UNIX. Round Brackets have special meaning in UNIX (run a command in a sub-shell), And as a UNIX specialist, I don’t like having spaces and special characters in file names anyway. One thing I definitely won’t do is rename my entire film collection because Plex dictates an arbitrary naming convention that could potentially break my system…
The problem is that you’re not following the naming convention. If you read any of the dozens of threads where people have problems like yous they always come down to the naming convention not being followed.
Oh, and file names with spaces, brackets and other such characters won’t in any way break your system. Many of us have been using those characters in file names for many years, heck decades, now without issue. Special characters are only special in certain circumstances, not universally.
Thank you for your reply, but its not helping.
The problem is with plex agents not able to read the year. **Plex does - the meta agents dont. ** This is the problem that needs resolving. Why dont you think thats an issue? Why must I follow a fixed - PLEX defined - naming convention for it to work? Thats stupid, inflexible and arrogant. Say (as an example) I bought a car and suddenly one day it stops working. Instead of fixing it, the garage tells me there’s no problem - it works fine as long as no-one sits in the back seat… Well that might be fine for people who dont use the back seat, but its a problem for me!!
Fact is I run more than just Plex on my Synology. I use my own processing scripts, along with a bunch of other things. My system WILL break if I change it, as I cannot guarantee that every script, every program that accesses those files will work with spaces/control codes in the filename.
Why cant you tell the agent (or Plex for that matter) where the year is embedded in the filename? Seems like a big big failing to me.
I’ve been running Plex for a number of years myself, this has only been an issue in the last year. Not sure the exact time it stopped working, but it was about a year ago.
@eustonr said:
Plex itself finds the films, and shows the correct year. But the meta agents have all been failing
You see that because Plex is not “finding” the film: what you see is just a re-parsed version of the file name, where extra symbols like dots or dashes are removed.
If you can’t comply with how Plex wants it, then there aren’t many choices left. Perhaps try this trick that Otto mentions in this thread - https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/93973/titles-i-manually-set-for-movies-are-being-wiped-out-with-every-library-update
If you have a particularly difficult movie, which plex never identifies correctly no matter what you do to rename the file. If you do this, you will eliminate the need to manually edit the metadata. It works only if the movie exists at IMDB.com Look it up there. Once you found it, take a look at the address bar of your web browser. There is the IMDB id as part of the URL which you will need for this trick.
Not to beat a dead horse, but I am curious as to why this behavior changed. If there was legacy code cleanup, I get that. But, it does break a prior behavior and there was no mention of this change in the release notes.
What exactly changed? The filename that Plex expects (and wants) has been the same for several years. What it is, is that it is very forgiving and tries it outmost to comply with various devations from the norm. It might work for at time, but as a library grows it will quickly descend into darkness if not following at least the basic rules regarding naming and folder structure. So afaik, there’s nothing “new” but just a “if you don’t follow Plex’s naming, you might get various results”.
