I am trying to re-organize some of my media folders by (1) copying things to a new location, (2) adding the new location to Plex, (3) waiting for it to find everything and then (4) removing the old location. While that has been working perfectly for TV Shows, it is [mostly] not working correctly for Movies. With Movies, after Step (3) instead of seeing Plex merge the new copy it discovers with the existing entry for the movie, I end up with a newly added, NEW copy of the movie. When I sort the library by Title I see two of almost everything. Strangely, a very few movies DO get merged correctly but I have been unable to find anything common between them to explain this.
I know could go through several thousand movies and manually select each pair and merge them but I should not need to – Plex did this in the past and still does for TV Shows.
Can anyone explain WHY it no longer merges duplicate movies automatically and/or tell me how to force it to perform the merge?
Didn’t we have this conversation already?
The old copy was matched with a different agent. Now your library has a different default metadata agent, so new items are matched with this.
The same movie matched with the TMDB agent is for Plex a different thing than the same movie matched with ‘Plex Movie’.
You will either have to switch back your standard agent or ‘merge’ the duplicates manually, pair by pair.
Thanks, Otto, for the quick and informative answer!
Reading about the Refresh Metadata function implied (to me, at least) that it would update all of my movies using the currently selected agent for the library. Did I misunderstand? I had started a refresh just before discovering your response, so I guess I will find out.
Merging by hand much be something I could suffer through – if the player didn’t keep altering the vertical spacing when I select the first (or deselect the last) item it would be a little easier to use, though still a royal P.I.T.A. due to the need to keep traveling the mouse from where I am working (with the movies) all the way to the top-right corner of the screen where the menu that contains merge is hidden. It is way too much like playing Whack-A-Mole trying to keep track of the moving click locations for selections while bouncing back and forth across a 40" UHD screen.
Too bad the player interface doesn’t provide a place to click on the selected movies with the most common things to do with a selected group, like merge, add to collection, delete, etc. Where’s the best place to suggest usability improvements and is there any chance at all of them being used?
And yes, I asked about this recently in the server topic but got zero replies, so I tried again in this topic.
No, it will only fetch fresh metadata using the same metadata agent.
The used metadata agent is a part of the item’s guid , which you can see in the Plex XML info
Changing the default agent of a library will not retroactively change the match of already-matched items. Only new items will get the new default agent.
I’ve found that maximising app windows is often not the optimal way for doing certain things.
For this task, try making the plex web window narrower and switch the library to the ‘list’ view mode.
[metadata] OK, so my best solution is to give up on the viewing and date added history and just wipe out the entire movie library and just add from the new location. At least that way, the bulk of the work will be done by the computer. Too bad there’s no way to tell Plex to do something like a CRC on the movie files that share the EXACT SAME FILENAME and just merge them BEFORE doing any agent retrievals.
[Whack-A-Mole] FWIW, I don’t run maximized, but it is still a large visual area for me to follow. I tried the list view and it just made it HARDER to work with when the list keeps moving up/down when the existence of a selection changes:
With nothing selected there is a TWO ROW ‘menu’ bar above the media list:
The main thing to focus on in the images is the location of the row with the list headings relative to the Search box at the top of the image. Everything below the headings moves up/down along with the headings producing a very jarring effect when trying to select multiple items. Older versions of the player did not do this and I had used the select feature often in the past when creating collections. At that time, (in grid mode) I could just move the mouse horizontally to click each item in sequence, I did not need to wait for things to move to a new place and adjust my ‘aim’ to follow the selection dot.
