I’ve tried TMDB and TVDB in the past but didn’t notice a big difference – mainly an occasional episode order flip. Luckily, my media naming conventions were specifically designed for Plex as I hadn’t started ripping until I’d chosen and installed Plex; that was a huge help avoiding many of the metadata sync issues others had mentioned at the time. Plus, my media is static – I ripped everything I had 6 or 7 years ago (?) when I set Plex up. I’m not adding new media as I enjoy watching what I’ve already got (and none of the new drek is really worth watching the first time).
I did add the Premier Year to my TV Series folder name last month. Previously, Plex didn’t care. Last month I noticed a large number of match errors where related to Plex matching to European or (newer) “remake” versions of a TV series. Assigning the premier year to the series folder name appears to have all but 1 of those.
I’ve also setup my customized media naming to mimic standardized movie and TV show naming conventions. Once I manually assigned the information, Plex would leave it alone - at least, until recently.
Plex has also decided to start combining similarly named files into one Plex entry. It has done that in the past, but I’d only encountered 4 or 5 instances ever. Allong with the major increase in match failures last week, I ended up with 27 groupings (so far) I’ve had to manually split. There are so many issues with that it’s not worth delving into here. IMO automatically combining media is such a rare necessity, it should be a manual option - not automatic (like Collections).
As I’m housebound and a major aspect of my day-to-day life is watching (and re-watching) my Home Theater media, disruptions like the last couple of months have a major impact. Prior to my server faux pas several months ago, Plex was a constant, reliable, and flawless platform. Not so since then.
I’ve come to the conclusion I have to consider ignoring all future server releases for fear performance will degrade even further. I can deal with missing posters - that used to be a simple one time fix, and I don’t really care if the metadata itself is incorrect - as long as the Poster and the title are correct. Meta mistakes now are a problem because of the erroneous renaming in the Plex entry making it difficult, if not impossible, to match an Plex mistake with the original file.
However, I cannot deal with audio issues. I’d thought I had resolved that after my NAS restore by doing the “deep” delete of the Plex app from my Roku account. I discovered this week that may not have been the issue (at least, not entirely); apparently, a match failure can also cause audio issues. I discovered that accidently when I forced a match on a series, and the audio issues were instantly corrected. After the NAS restore, I had a nearly 100% media match and everything (audio and video) was peachy, so the audio issue was NOT there until the match failure increased last weekend.
Last weekend my match rate plummeted to less than 50% overnight. PM, I was blissfully watching yet another episode of The Closer and Hogan’s Heroes. Saturday morning, The Closer was screeching at me, and Hogan’s Heroes would only play at 200% volume (40 rather than 20) – the same issue as pre-NAS restore. The only thing I did was between was to upgrade the Library (Plex wouldn’t Scan without upgrading the Library) and I upgraded to the latest Plex server (1.40.4.8555). The minute it started to scan, it actually “unmatched” a large percentage of the “good” matches, combined 30-40 files into the 27 aforementioned “combined” groups, and miss-matched a large percentage of those remaining.
I can’t handle having the manually correcting increasing Plex match problems every single time it Scans, especially as it no longer leaves currently assigned matches alone. Which means I’m going to have to consider downloading metadata locally to avoid Plex removing or replacing a good match with bad info.
No need to respond. I’ve manually assigned matches to 35% of the unmatched non-custom media so far and hope to have the rest done by the end of the week. I’ve turned off all the auto-syncing settings I can find; hopefully that will allow Plex to not automatic update anything. Fingers crossed
