Server Version#: 1.21.0.3616
Player Version#: 4.43.4
Hello,
Recently when I’ve added new versions of movies already in the library, the new version shows up as a new movie entry. This includes when the new version of the file is located in exactly the same folder. Later, when I manually merge the items in Plex, the play history is lost. My expectation was that merging would maintain this kind of meta data, otherwise, what is the point of merging (may as well just delete the old entries).
Is this a bug or oversight in design? If so, any plans to fix it?
If not, what are the workarounds to workflow to maintain play history data when merging or having duplicate entries in Plex?
Hello - Just bumping this. Not sure if data loss of play history is by design when merging. Hopefully, there’s a way to preserve that data? Appreciate support from the community or perhaps folks like @elan. Thanks!
that’s an interesting one, actually. i swore this is what we were already doing, but it looks like we’re just taking the identity of one of the items, so the playback/history for the other would be lost. i’ll file an issue internally.
It depends which version is selected first. When you merge, the item which is selected last will change its identity and therefore its playback history to the one which got selected first.
So if you selected your new version first, then the old item lost its playback history.
General rule: If you have converted your movie library (“upgrade matching”), you need to perform “Refresh Metadata” before you do a quality upgrade.
This “matching upgrade” is not complete without a refresh of metadata. Until you do it, all the items are in a weird state where they still have the guid of the old “Legacy” agent.
But if you add a new file to the library, it will get its guid from the new agent, which will be different from the legacy guid.
I had noticed the first item selected takes precedence, but did not know about the metadata refresh helping to avoid the problem altogether for upgrades. That’s exactly the context for this issue, and this is quite helpful.
Going back to improving the merge functionality, it’s also worth noting that for items after the first selection lose their playlist entries as well. So for example, if item A was on playlist 1 and item B was on playlist 2, the new combined item A+B will no longer be on playlist 2.
