So I can ffmpeg -metadata title=“Title” and Plex will use “Title”. I want to set the sort title similarly. Is there a metadata key I can use for that? Is there a list of metadata to use?
I mean really I just want a way to automate and script this. Manually popping open a browser and clicking around a bunch for every file is tedious.
Server Version#:1.25.6.5577
Start by telling which kind file. 
I mean, a video file? What, do you want mkv, mp4, avi? Worst case I can package in an mp4 if that’s what it takes. I mean, how many options do I even have to respond? Go ahead and answer with an answer if you have one. Better yet, a place where it lists metadata that Plex uses
Plex can only read the title tag from mp4/m4v files.
AFAIK you can also use the year, description, and genre tags.
If you set an “album” tag, Plex will automatically create a collection and place the file within.
So is that only title/year/description/genre/album that it uses?
I now used MetaX to write the metadata, which works with Plex - as metadata key “sort_name” or apparently written as bytes ‘sonm’
The infuriating problem is that ffmpeg does not WRITE that metadata key for some godforsaken reason. It can READ that metadata and parse it as ‘sort_name’ - but not WRITE it? It CAN write it to MKV files, but Plex doesn’t read MKV metadata at all? What gives there? ffmpeg can write all metadata under the MDTA format, which understandably I guess Plex can’t read.
I think my option now is to fork ffmpeg to actually write that metadata. Given that this sort_name tag seems to be part of the MP4 spec and recognized by multiple tthings, ffmpeg ought to write it
Also I’m now going to use exiftool to write the metadata -
exiftool.exe -SortName="Sorted Title" file.mp4
Actually my solution now is to use a plug-in 3rd party agent that reads a simple textfile sitting next to the movie (since Plex won’t read mkv metadata, and ffmpeg will delete mp4 metadata if you ever do additional processing to the file after adding SortName)
I did have to edit it to add title_sort though but that was easy enough. And I can’t use Plex’s fancy new Plex Movie Agent for some reason because you can’t add plug-ins to it? Whatever, that doesn’t matter.
gotta love the question, followed by “oh, I don’t have an answer for any file anyway”
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