The metadata agents are incredibly frustrating. I shouldn’t HAVE TO look up the year a show started to get an exact name match to even show up in the list of matches. For example: Fantasy Island. When I name a folder “Fantasy Island,” why wouldn’t BOTH Fantasy Islands show up in the list of matches? Then I could choose one instead of scrolling through a list of 20 shows with the word “island” in them that are not even close to Fantasy Island. Instead I have to figure out whether Fantasy Island started in 2020 or 2021 just to get it to show up. It’s stupid. Not intuitive at all. On top of that, sometimes I name a folder the exact name of a show, and instead of listing ANY show that matches, I get a list of 20 KIND OF similarly named shows, but not the exact match at all. It’s not that complicated. Come on, guys.
Add matching ids from imdb, tmdb or tvdb to the folder names and that will solve that problem. Plex will 100% get the match right without having fix match anything.
You mean, that I do all the matching job instead of Plex? Maybe your library has 5 movies.
My library has 3K+ movies and 500+ shows. Its up to you what you want to do but if you use ids (which plex supports and is a feature of plex) then you never need to ever worry about mismatches.
I use the year in parens for the folder and file which greatly helps, with the occasional one off that doesn’t like to cooperate. “House on Haunted Hill (1959)” and such.
Ok, agreed, maybe that will work reliably. But you’re having to look up the movie on an external site to get the IDs for every movie. Plex is already looking up those sites. So when the matching gets it wrong and you try to fix the match in Plex, is it not reasonable to expect some decent choices to appear?
Anyway, it seems the two of you are talking around each other because you have very different ideas of how you want it work. So there’s never going to be agreement here – or even a decent exchange of ideas.
There is no maybe about it, it does work 100% of the time. Yes it takes a little time setup but once done you never need to worry about it.
As I say its really up to folks who curate their own servers how much time they want to spend getting the naming of files/folder correct which plex will work with. IDs work 100%. After many years of working with plex anything else is just hit and miss and could require manual fixup. Think of all the time folks spend on that activity and if they invested the time to work with ids for matching it would be better IMO.
Also… if for whatever reason you need to rebuild your plex server, which I’ve needed to do at least 5 times now for various different reasons then you would need to do all that manual fixup again. Not needed if you use the ids.
Anyhow, just making the point regarding ids as a lot of folks don’t know how to use them and really it saves a huge headache in the long run for admins.
Plex is my #1 hobby. I spend far more time on it than anything else I have fun with. I’m really proud of my super manicured library.
You guys make good points, but none of us would have to spend much time at all if the Metadata agents were written with a little more intelligence and actually did the job they’re meant for, which is to save us all time and energy gathering Metadata for our libraries. Simple fixes in the algorithm is ALL it would take.
I have added close to 1,000 TV shows at one time and the only shows that didn’t match properly are shows like HomeServer137 was talking about. Fantasy Island, that have two different selections. The Office UK and The Office US, but those problems are from the files or folders not being named properly. The files generally come named correctly but I guess you might have to look up a date once and a while.
I understand Plex brings up some selections when you manually match a show that are totally off base and ridiculous but they generally have the right show in there somewhere.
Nothing is perfect and I still find it kind of amazing that you can add a file to a drive and 3 seconds later the movie or episode is matched with artwork, a description and the actors with zero effort on my part.
I recently moved my server to a new computer and I just kept the copy of my sever on a zip file on another drive in case I have to rebuild.
BTW in the fix match search options box…on many occasions I’ve found it’s better just to delete the date that pops up altogether before you search it
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
