I’m having problems with rescanning my libraries. I have a single library, called “Movies”, which has nine folders in it. A lot of my media do not match anything, so I have to provide custom posters. No problem, more than happy to do so. Now, when I add new video files, I have to do a scan of the Movies library before it shows up (even though it’s supposed to update nightly). The problem is that when I rescan, movies which have not been changed show up as being new, and with no posters; I have to download them again. Also, video files which I split show back up as stacked and I have to fix that again as well. Could somebody help me with this? And please, no one bring up the whole file naming/dancing issue. I need Plex to respect the settings I gave it and to only pick up new movies. I’ll provide whatever logs I can, I’m just tired of having to redo this constantly. It’s not all of my custom videos mind you, it’s random it seems. I need new media files to be picked up on when they are added to the library and not required a full scan. Somebody please help if you can.
You probably have a naming problem. Give an example of your file naming for problem files.
90% of the time or better problems like you describe are due to naming the file differently than Plex’s standards. Movie files should be named like:
MovieName (Year released).ext
You can add the IMBD ID to make the matching better like:
MovieName (Year released) (IMDB ID).ext
Also if the files are mp4s or maybe mkvs then embedded metadata could be screwing things up. To fix that is easy. Just go into settings on your server and into “agents” and for each section there move “Local media assets” below everything else.
You can name your files any way you want but if you want Plex to work properly you need to follow Plex’s standards.
Even though you don’t want to hear about naming that is what the problem could be.
Rule #1 when inputting custom meta data:
If you have media which are not getting a ‘match’ via the Plex online metadata sources
(for instance because what you have are not movies or regular tv shows but your own custom videos)
you need to make sure that these items are not ‘unmatched’ but are classified as ‘Personal Media’.
Otherwise Plex will attempt to match them to stuff in its online metadata sources.
The best approach would be to create a separate library and set the default metadata source for this library to ‘Personal Media’.
But if you have custom media together with normal movies in one library, you want to perform a ‘Fix Match’ and pick the ‘Personal Media’ agent while doing so.
But why is it changing the entries that I’ve already adjusted? For example, I have one file “Teen Wolf Season One.mkv”; I’ve added the poster, it is not matched, but Plex, on a full scan, decides to delete the poster and here I am, adding posters yet again. That’s the problem. I’m not doing a naming dance, I just want Plex to leave these unmatched videos alone. Does that make sense?
I’ve set local media assets as the last item under Personal Media, Plex Movie, and The Movie Database. I thought, though, that if I did that, Plex wouldn’t be matching things and all posters would go away? Is that correct? I definitely don’t want to lose that.
I’m going through and setting these to “Personal media”. Is there a way to get a list of all of the unmatched videos in a library? RIght now mine are all lumped together in a single library and I really don’t want to try and separate these, I have over 4K videos.
You want to Edit your library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and set ‘Agent’ to ‘Personal Media’
Because it is unmatched. Upon a library update, plex tires to match unmatched items. And while it is doing so, it will reset the majority of metadata of that item.
If I set agent to “Personal Media”, Plex will no longer attempt to match my video files, correct? My library is mixed with personal (unmatchable) media AND matchable media.
It looks as if I can just set the unmatchable media to “Personal Media” on a case by case basis and keep them in the same library. Not ideal I know, but at this point it would be just a pain to try and separate them out. Is there a way to get a list of “unmatched or unmatchable media”?
I’m okay if my mkvs aren’t matchable, I don’t mind using the Personal Media option for them, not a problem. I just needed a solution to my initial issue, I didn’t know what Plex was doing to me, it was like torture I don’t follow the TV setup because I want a single mkv which is the entire season, not broken down into separate files for each episode. It’s just a personal preference is all.
I don’t follow the TV setup because I want a single mkv which is the entire season, not broken down into separate files for each episode. It’s just a personal preference is all.