If you go to Movies and pull down the first filter drop-down, one of the options in the top section of that menu is “Unmatched.” I want the opposite, “Matched.”
This is because if I subtract the number of “Unmatched” movies from the count of movies in my library, I can see that it’s about an order of magnitude high. Every now and then, I stumble across one of these mis-matched movies and have to un-match it.
These mis-matches are happening because I have a lot of non-Hollywood non-mainstream movies in my library, so the chances of a good match are actually fairly small across the whole library.
It’d be helpful if I could pull up a list of movies Plex thinks it has matches for, then sort by Added Order and prune it back to the list that actually is properly-matched. Once I start on this project, I’d expect the set of good matches to collect toward the bottom of that list, since I don’t add new matchable movies very often. Therefore, almost everything at the top of the list will be incorrect matches, so they’ll be easy to knock off.
One way this could work is if this set of canned filters were available for selection in Custom Filter, so I could say something like “Filter” -> “is not” -> “Unmatched”.
I’m confused. How would finding matched items help you identify mis-matched items.
If you are adding mostly unmatchable movies, it would probably be better to change the agent for the entire library to “Personal Media”, that way PMS won’t even try to match them. Then you can manually match the ones that you know can be done.
How would finding matched items help you identify mis-matched items.
Right now the mis-matched items are intermixed with the un-matched items. Short of clicking through each and every movie in my library to find the mis-matched ones, how am I going to find them in the current scheme?
Keep in mind that this only gets worse as I get closer to the end of this project. Eventually I’m going to be on a snipe hunt for the one last mis-matched movie in a sea of un-matched movies.
change the agent for the entire library to “Personal Media”,
I’m in Settings → Agents, but I don’t see any single setting that matches your description. There is no “entire library” for example.
Are you saying you want me to uncheck everything under Movies except for the “Personal Media” agent? That seems wrong since I think I also want “Local Media Assets,” meaning file tags, as edited by iTunes, Subler, etc., right?
Also, wouldn’t unchecking everything prevent Right-Click → Match from using those sources on demand?
Right, but if there was a “matched” filter, you would have matched/mismatched together. Just curious how that is better than unmatched/mismatched you see now?
Nope, not there. Click the … menu to the right of the library itself, then manage library, edit. Go to the advanced tab, scroll down to agent.
how that is better than unmatched/mismatched you see now?
Since almost everything that’s now matched is incorrectly matched, I’ll start by going through the list of movies one by one, kicking movies out of that set. The filter immediately has value, because once I eject a movie from the “matched” set, it will disappear from the grid.
Once I’ve made a complete pass through all the movies, inversely culling the set of correctly-matched movies by rejecting the incorrectly-matched movies, I can then sort that filter’s results by “Date Added”, which will put new additions at the top, which means they’re the most suspect. Also, I’ll see a bunch of familiar and obviously-correctly matched movies at some point while going down the list, back in time, which will tell me when I can stop looking for incorrect matches.
Click the … menu to the right of the library itself,
I have no idea what you mean by that. We are talking about the web UI, yes? I’m running 1.18.1.1973, and it says it’s up to date.
I have a “PLEX” button, and a Home button under that, neither of which have a “…” menu to the right. I have a vertical ellipsis menu (⋮) when hovering over some of the items below “Home,” but that doesn’t sound like “the library itself.”
Ok, I get it. However, if you have more things that are mismatched then correctly matched/unmatched, it might be easier to recreate your library and start over using the correct agent this time. This way, nothing will be matched and you can match them manually when needed.
Thank you. I interpreted “the library” as “everything Plex manages.” I never even considered that “Movies” was a separate library from “TV Shows,” etc., so I didn’t even try clicking on those vertical ellipses.
It’s kind of a strange usage of the word, if you think about it: the fiction books and the movies and the newspaper microfiche are all in a single building called “the library” in my town. I’m just saying, your use of the term for media collections is nonstandard.
it might be easier to recreate your library and start over using the correct agent this time
I’m not trying to be difficult, but I tried that, and it was completely unsuitable, in several respects.
It requires that I throw away my hand-cultivated edits over the past 2 or so years I’ve used Plex. Some of these edits were to correct mismatches and such, but not all. It also requires that I toss play counts, ratings, and other metadata stored outside the media files.
In the mode where it doesn’t search the Internet for movie matches, it appears to use the file name as the movie title, even if it contains extraneous stuff like “(1080p HD)” as iTunes does.
iTunes is my primary media manager. I use Plex as a secondary, pointed at the same media files, because it has some features iTunes doesn’t. There’s a chance I’ll move entirely to Plex, especially with this app breakup in Catalina, which I haven’t moved to yet, but I’d still rather not go rename all of those movie files just to placate Plex. The proper title’s in the movie metadata; there should be an option to make Plex use it in preference to the file name.
In this mode, Plex now considers every movie matched, not everything unmatched. This means I now can’t discern my Hollywood movies from those that don’t automatically match known movies the databases.
In the more extreme of the modes, where I tell it it’s all personal media, I don’t even get the option to do Internet movie matching.
I’ve had to restore my Plex database from backups. I want the “Matched” filter even more now.
This really shouldn’t be too difficult to develop. You’ve already got the code, you’ve just got to flip a Boolean flag and make some UI adjustments.
1 - understood. If you unmatch things, the counts will still get lost.
2 - If iTunes is filling in the title field, then PMS will use that title. What type of files are these? PMS can’t read the title from every file format.
3 - That’s what happens since when you started the library you told PMS to try and match everything.
4 - You can. Go to the movie’s preplay page, then in the top right corner, find the 3 vertical dots, then there should be a fix match option. In the window that comes up, change the agent to Plex Movie. That will match only that 1 specific movie.
If you unmatch things, the counts will still get lost.
Broken if true. What do play counts and star ratings have to do with IMDB movie matches and suchlike? Why should unmatching the title reset play counts and ratings?
If iTunes is filling in the title field, then PMS will use that title. What type of files are these?
They’re MP4s (ISO media), and I’m telling you, if the “Name” field in Subler says “Foo”, and it’s a 1080p movie, iTunes will name it “Foo (1080p HD).mp4”, and Plex will import it as “Foo (1080p HD)” in this mode, not as “Foo”.
you told PMS to try and match everything.
No, I told it to match nothing by denying it access to Internet databases, as you suggested, by telling PMS it was all personal media. That should mean there are no matches.
there should be a fix match option
Yes, and I’m telling you that in this mode, the dialog that pops up shows only one entry, a duplicate of the movie’s own file metadata. No Internet metadata shows up. I have to go back into the library settings and take it out of the mode you suggested above to get it to look metadata up online again, giving me options in that dialog box.
That is because the ‘library language’ is set to ‘not defined’, if you make it a Personal Video library.
If you then open the ‘Match’ dialog, a search is done with language=not defined which bears no results.
You always have to click on ‘Search Options’ and set a language and the desired metadata agent.
Playback is tracked based on how the entry is saved in the database, which uses an ID, not the filename or movie name. A matched movie and an unmatched movie have different IDs so switching between the 2 loses the tracked info. The tracking is based on ID so if you remove a file, then add it back and it can be matched to the same movie again, the old playback info is retained. This is intentional, not a bug.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. This was for files you add in the future. It does not retroactively go back and change items you already have, so this did not “unmatch” your videos. They were still “matched” from when you added the files initially.
To summarize, the workarounds given are unsuitable, so can we please just go back to my original suggestion and either:
Add a “Matched” filter as an inverse of the present “Unmatched” filter; or
Allow inclusion of “Unmatched” into a filter as a rule and then have a way to invert the logic so I can manually construct a “Matched” smart playlist.
Either way, I can then manually fix up these unfortunate matches without having to click on each and every movie in my library to figure out which ones are matched.
