Server Version#: 1.25.6.5577-c8bd13540 amd64 (just updated from 1.25.5 a few minutes ago)
Player Version#: Whatever going to plex(dot)tv gets me, not relevant here anyway
So I noticed a couple weeks ago that several of my movies got randomly “un-matched”. They retained most of the metadata from being previously matched like the cast, description and such, but the release year, box art and title were lost. For example, “Mummy, The - Bluray.mkv” was previously listed properly as “The Mummy” and showed the box art. When I noticed the issue I went through and manually matched all of the affected titles and all was well and good, until today I noticed that all the same titles have been un-matched again. I did go ahead and upgrade PMS to the latest stable version (listed above) that was available in the apt repo, but I didn’t see any mention in the release notes of this issue, so I’m not sure if the issue has been resolved yet or not.
I saw somebody else posting about the same issue and they seemed rather upset that people were accusing them of doing something wrong, so here’s how my Plex server is set up, and how it has ran perfectly fine for years until just recently.
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (previously upgraded in place from 10)
Movies Path: /mnt/storage/Videos/Movies
TV Shows Path: /mnt/storage/Videos/TV Shows
I could be wrong, but it seems to me like it only affects movies for which I had to manually “Fix Match” when originally adding the movie. “Some” of my movies are in their own subfolders with bonus content and such, but so far all of the ones I’m finding that have been affected are just stand-alone files like “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes - Bluray.mkv”. In fact, a lot of them have the " - Bluray" tacked onto the filename. I’ve been saving my movies like this for years so that I know what media format the movie came from so that, at a glance, if I say find a Bluray copy of a movie in the $5 bin that I only have a DVD copy of, I know whether or not to grab it. For example, I’ve got a dozen or so movies that are named like, “Parent Trap - VHS.mkv” because I captured the movie from one of my VHS tapes using a USB capture card and VCR, so perhaps those are messing with its ability to match them? For the record, “Parent Trap” was also affected. The problem though is that all of the affected entries were properly matched before, and have also been fixed at least once a couple weeks ago when I first noticed it, and have now been “un-matched” again, so I’m not sure what in the world is going on.
Also, for the record, like 99% of my movies are in the “Moviename - Format.ext” format, so not every movie that ends in " - Bluray" or " - VHS" is affected, only some.
Just made another observation. If I had previously selected a non-default movie poster/box art when the entry was originally “matched”, then that box art was preserved and only the year of release is lost, and when clicking the 3 dots the item is not listed as being “matched”, so I have the option to “match” it to a title.
On all of the affected titles where I left the movie poster/box art at the default, it reverted the poster to just a random still image from the movie.
Try adjusting your naming a bit. Use the name as listed in IMDB or TMDB for movies: The Mummy instead of Mummy, The.
Adding the year definitely helps, especially for movies such as The Mummy, where there are several versions (1932, 1959, 1999, 2017). There have been multiple releases of The Parent Trap as well.
Place the extra info, resolution & such, in square brackets, so Plex will ignore it.
I have also seen other posts where additional info in the file name has caused issues for some people (-something, _01, etc). Plex does seem to be a bit more sensitive to file name variations recently. The closer you can follow what is in the documentation the better the matching results should be when adding media to your system.
For simple pattern match renaming, look at PowerRename in Microsoft PowerToys (Microsoft, github). It would make quick work of finding something like -VHS and replacing it with [VHS].
I had completely forgotten that Plex ignored things in square brackets, and I had already considered adding the year to the names. The thing that bugged me though was that these movies “were” matched, and then just mysteriously got un-matched, twice now.
I run Linux on my desktop PCs as well so doing custom/batch renaming shouldn’t be a huge issue or anything, so I may just go ahead and start doing that; add the format in square brackets and add the year in parenthesis. It’s just that, man, I’ve added a LOT of movies over the years, I’m at just over 800, so even though replacing every occurrence of " - Bluray" with " [Bluray]" isn’t difficult, there’s not really a way to batch rename every movie to have its own year of release in the name, I may just start with the ones that are having issues and leave all the rest alone.
Oh yeah also, the reason I’ve been doing “, The” instead of having “The” at the beginning is because when I’m organizing things alphabetically it’s much easier to find things. There’s tons of movies that start with “The” or “A”, so generally if a movie starts with one of those, I stick it on the end. That way if I’m looking for “The Lion King” in the file share, I can just scroll down to the L’s because it’s listed as “Lion King, The” instead of just being 1 of several hundred movies that start with “The”. I’ll start with the format and year first, I’d like to keep this part of my naming scheme,
Just wanted to add that I’ve noticed this in the last few weeks, too. I’ve got Tautulli sending library updates into a Slack channel and every now and again (two or three times now) it’ll alert me to about ten “new” movies that have actually been there for ages, but they’ve lost all their metadata.
I agree, the problem here isn’t the matching (I don’t mind manually matching stuff every now and again when I add it if it doesn’t automatically match), but that stuff is getting “unmatched” for some reason.
I am having the same issue but my its just the poster, I posted on another thread but no response other then to go to this thread. It’s random and on movies that plex matched.
Movies Path: /mnt/user/plex_media/
Naming Structure: /Movies/8 Mile (2002)/8 Mile (2002).mkv
Link to all the info that might be useful or relevant to the problem in my other post. My Post
I may just start with the ones that are having issues and leave all the rest alone.
