I have my movies titles named a particular way and when Plex finds the movie, it modifies the name. I also need to manually add the cover art (which is fine).
I recently added a new drive and moved movies around. In doing this, I found I have to unmatch all the movies to re-match them in order to ensure the title stays the way I want and to add the cover. I also am doing it to make sure the top pick is the correct movie.
To save time unmatching and matching, is there a way to turn off automatch until I am all done and then turn it back on?
I should also add that I do not want to make changes to it automatically matching for my TV shows.
Are they traditional released movies, seen on IMDB or TMDB? If so, consider baking the IMDB id into the [Edit] filename as seen in the “Naming your media” article here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/#toc-0
This allows you to automate Plex picking the correct movie regardless of the filename.
As far as I know, there is no way to temporarily “turn off” media matching in a library, only to enable it later.
If your media is manually made (home video, drone footage, CCTV, etc), consider using the “Other Videos” library instead.
Additionally, if you use the mp4 file container format, you can embed your preferred version of the title into the file itself. From where Plex can read and use it, if instructed to do so.
If you put a poster.jpg file with the preferred poster motive into the same folder, you can instruct Plex to prefer that one.
Both settings are in the properties of the library, on the Advanced tab.
Thank you Divideby0. Yes, my files are correctly named, however, I have still seen Plex mis-match (which I get as nothing is 100% perfect). Yes, these are all movies that are listed on IMDB and TMDB. I have been going in and adding the IMDB number for the movies that Plex isn’t able to correctly match, but I have been having to unmatch first in order to rematch and was just looking to see if I could save a couple of steps.
I appreciate the information. I can continue to unmatch and rematch.
OttoKerner, thank you. I am willing to give it a try with a little bit of help.
In the past, I had read about the poster.jpg, but when I did that, Plex did not use the poster, so I went back and fixed the names to match the mp4 file. Maybe I don’t have the correct box checked in the advanced section. Which box would I check off?
My movies are all mp4. How would I do what you said, “embed your preferred version of the title into the file itself”?
the checkboxes “Use local assets” and “Prefer local metadata” are ticked https://support.plex.tv/articles/advanced-settings-plex-movie-agent/ (if you uncheck the former, the poster is imported, but not automatically selected. You are however able to select it manually when editing the item in Plex.)
You use an app which is able to write embedded meta tags into mp4 files.
For writing the Title tag, even the file properties of Windows file explorer are sufficient, but a dedicated app provides more comfort and automation.
For Windows, I recommend mp3tag
mp3tag for instance can read (a portion) of the file’s name and use that to fill the Title tag on many files each with individual content.
(fill only the “Title” tag; leave all other fields empty for now, until you have learned about the consequences of using e.g. the Album tag for movies.)
Well, you can shorten the “unmatch then rematch” step by picking “Fix Match…” option on a movie to quickly get the match dialog box.
Of course, ideally it would be best for Plex to not mess up matching at all. By the sound of your first post, you seemed to imply that your filenames were not 100% accurate to official (ish) names, and knew ahead of time that it could cause your files to mis-match. I 100% sympathize with using custom filenames, as I do that all the time for organization’s sake. Many movie series do not use file-system-friendly names, so they do not sort based on release. If I pre-pend the movie series number (1 - Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).mkv for example), that is often enough to cause Plex to fail to match. So in these cases, I know ahead of times that my title is not perfect, I will append text to the end of the filename to force a perfect match: 1 - Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) {tmdb-85}.mkv.
I’m curious what movies you have that you claim are correctly titled, yet fail to match to the correct movie immediately. This is probably only for my own curiosity, but could you provide an example filename of a movie that Plex did not match properly the first time? If you do not feel comfortable naming a movie here, I understand and will drop the question.
I hope that Otto’s suggestion works out best for you. I do not use mp4’s, only mkv’s, so I am at the mercy of using Plex’s matching system to get the titles.
Thanks. Yes, I have it sorted the way Plex’s instructions, for example, Drive/Movies/A (if the movies start with A)/Movie title, year released, rating/mp4 & cover art (both named the same as the folder. If the system didn’t find the correct match, I would put imdb-### at the end of the mp4 file name and Plex is able to find the correct title without issues.
The other issue I have come into is movies I have downloaded, Plex does not add the album art. You guys have helped me with this answer in the past which required additional software to embed, which did not save me time when I have one or two movies at a time with this issue so I just did the unmatch and match then found the poster and that has worked.
I’ll take a look at the steps you have given me. When it is here and there, it doesn’t seem like a lot of work to make it perfect how I want it, but when there are 6,000 titles, it is daunting to make sure it’s all perfect (and I cannot leave it not perfect).
Thanks Divide. I actually prefer to unmatch first. It removes the movie title and leaves the title to how I have it organized in the folder. It may seem a little crazy to some but when I am looking for a movie, I want to be able to easily view the rating and date it was released without clicking on the movie to see that information. When I’m on the computer, I can hover over the title to see the details I want.
The image below shows how I have it filed. This may be a bad example because sometimes when there are collections Plex cannot tell because of the way it’s name and those are often fixed by me adding the imdb, but you get what I mean.
As far as the matching, I cannot remember which one it was but there are times when the movie shows up more than once when I go to match and I since I want Plex to find the top and correct one, I then adjust from there accordingly. There are times when the year doesn’t match and I fix the file and that fixes it, but if not, imdb number.
I’ll let you know the next time I come across one to show you. This is a slow process since I’m making sure now all the movies are correct so I’m sure there will be more.
