Metadata Date issue, Video files (Personal Media Shows)

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#:1.19.4.2935
Player Version#:4.30.2

I have home movies, setup as a series, using Personal Media Shows as the agent. I am following the naming convention, and I have Titles in my m4v files as well as “Media created” dates.

The issue is it will pick up the files, get the Title, an “sometimes” read the “Media created” date to populate the “Originally Available”.

I cannot find any pattern.

If I navigate to the storage over SAMBA, right click from Windows, edit, and change the date, hit “apply”, it will refresh because of file watchers and update in Plex with the correct date. I can then change it back to what it was, hit apply, and it will refresh, and it works as well, so it’s not a parsing issue on that one date.

If I don’t edit the file and trigger a file change, and hit “refresh meta” on the episode, or “refresh all metadata” from the library, neither of those work, it will not update. I’m pretty sure this is basically doing nothing.

If I delete the file, let file watcher auto remove, then copy it again, it will sometimes get the date right and sometimes not.

When it doesn’t work it’s the January 1900 file date.

It makes adding files take forever, I manually check each one and update.

Something wrong in the parser, will look at logs in a bit and try to add them

2

There are no errors in the logs… I also checked the file before and after an edit in exiftool and they are the same

3

So I did another test and did not change the date on the file, but just renamed it to something else, file watcher picked it up, and it read the date just fine. So nothing is wrong with the metadata. It seems with the Personal Media Shows agent it’s not reading date on the first scan, and the “Refresh Metadata” or “Refresh All Metadata” do not do anything…

If I rename the file, then rename it back, it picks up the date…

4

If I do “analyze” on the episode it will fix it… So it’s really just bad at getting all the metadata when you first add it some times, most of the time, but always the title…

I was confused and thought that’s what refresh metadata did…

less of a pain, but still a pain

5

To add to this issue, Plex is giving me serious trouble with date organization in Personal Media library. The filenames contain accurate structure with “ShowName - YYYY-MM-DD - Title” and I can see that upon the first sweep of a Library Scan, the episodes display the dates from the filenames. However, as the scan finishes, the dates are then replaced by the date contained within the file’s “Creation Date”. No amount of Plex Dancing is resolving this. I’ve tried Refresh Metadata, Analyze, etc. I have reformatted the dates to all of the accepted formats. I have tried putting each year into its own season folder.

No methods have yet to produce desired results.

My goal here is to end up with a library full of video files that fill in the desired metadata upon scan, to minimize the amount of hands-on I have to be, whenever a new scan is completed. So, for example, the “Title” field is populated within the file properties. However I cannot remove the “Created Date” as that’s a mandatory field.

If Plex could stop overriding the filename’s date with the “Created Date”, that would be swell…

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