I spent a good five hours today trying to sort meta data but now it has completely stopped working.
I want to manually enter the data and not use scanners, because my i.p recently got blocked from a site that I was scanning.
And I installed the XBMCnfoMoviesImporter and use tiny media manager to create the nfo.
I will tell you what my folder structure is, maybe i’m doing something wrong.
Some of the issues I had today, cast images will show once i linked the direct url from where the image, tried linking with folder directory path as i downloaded the image but it did not work.
When refreshing the movie, the trailer for the movie becomes duplicated in plex.
only one fanart shows, not sure why it does not find the others.
And now nothing is working.
The reason why I wanted to do local only is because I don’t want to risk my i.p being blocked from scans, and I want to make the .actor not have multiple duplicates because a actor is in multiple movies.
I have had plex for a long time and the main problem I have had was meta data, as I liked to take data from multiple sites and make it in to one.
It would be greatly appreciated, if anyone can help me, as I spent the majority of the day trying to figure it out but it does not work.
check out the guide for media preparation. even if you don’t want to use the regular agents, Plex will look for local media assets based on the defined naming conventions.
as you have all your movie content in an own folder, you don’t have to repeat the movie name as a prefix for every element. instead go for: movies/moviename (2017)/ movies/moviename (2017)/moviename-pt1.mp4 movies/moviename (2017)/moviename-pt2.mp4 movies/moviename (2017)/trailer.mp4 movies/moviename (2017)/poster.jpg movies/moviename (2017)/fanart.jpg movies/moviename (2017)/fanart-2.jpg movies/moviename (2017)/fanart-3.jpg
also makes it easier to read
make sure Local Media assets are activated.
As for the .actors and moviename.nfo files, I suppose you got an agent that will read those into Plex?!
Thank you for the the quick response I will make the following changes now.
The moviename.nfo seems to be working it’s picking up the .actors but in plex it’s either a greyish circle or the initials for the actors first name and surname.
In the section if go to the website and put the direct url it works, but when I try to put the local file path it just shows initials.
Maybe I need to to use the Internet links, but I did not want to have duplicate actor images.
Also I wanted to know regarding the images one plex has gotten the images, when you refresh the meta data does it scan the website urls or does the images just all come from local database after the initial first scan?
FileBot (link in my signature) can handle that for you automatically or manually in seconds.
What FileBot can’t do is remove possible embedded metadata in the Title Field of MP4/M4V files. Plex will read this info and prefer it over a perfect file name/structure, but you can combat that situation by moving Local Media Assets to the bottom of every agent list you can find. All tabs in TV Shows and Movies here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200241558-Agents
Just drag LMA to the bottom of the list and drop it. If you do have embedded metadata this will cure the issue, if you don’t it won’t matter. LMA will do what it has to from the bottom.
Renaming/restructuring is best performed OUTSIDE the library and you may need to write a new bundle for the show or movie so The Plex Dance® was invented:
I’ve never actually had the information in the nfo files for actors work in Plex. as mentioned, I get a grey circle. or initial icon. I only use the nfo method occasionally when I can’t get a match any other way, though. My assumption was that the usual Plex agents and the nfo importing agent didn’t play together well. Not only did it give a generic image for the videos that used the nfo agent, it also changed the movies and TV shows actors images to the generic image for movies I had previously matched with the “standard” agents.
I just leave the actor information out now for nfo matched files, because it’s a rarely used method. That probably won’t work for anyone that wants to exclusively use that agent. I would report the bug, if that’s what it is, in the XBMCnfoMoviesImporter thread. Maybe there’s a work-around or different method to use to grab the images.
So after following @tom80H and @JuiceWSA advice the issue is now fixed, the naming convention helped a lot with the issue.
I ended up just adding the actors direct url image in to the .nfo file and now the actors pictures are now showing.
So now my last question is because I used a link to the webpage image in the .nfo file and it shows in my plex, is it now saved locally for example if that link becomes unavailable or the website updates the image. Will it mess with my image?
I plan to move everything to NAS so hope it does not cause any issues if it does re scan the site.
