Movies showing up twice in collection - Grouped and separate

General Discussions
1

I’ve never seen this behavior before and thought it odd, but only slightly bothersome:

A friend gave me a 4-disc DVD set of old Alfred Hitchcock films. The set is packaged as “Legends Series, Alfred Hitchcock, The Legend Begins.” There are 5 movies on each disc. I ripped them all, then as is my habit, I correct tagged each one of them. This included the “Album” field which I populated as “The Legend Begins, Disc X”, X being 1 to 4 accordingly.

This resulted in each movie having a listing but also four listings - one for each disc - with the 5 movies nested within it. I assume this was caused by the Album label? If so, I see some potential uses for this. For example, I have the Bond DVD set. If I gave them all an Album name of “Bond Movies” I would have a single listing and could select a specific movie from within it. However, the problem would be the individual movies are still showing also. A double entry is definitely NOT what I’m after.

Unless someone has another idea, I guess I have to delete the “Album” tag from these Hitchcock movies to prevent the double listing?

2

This is the new collection feature.
It is explained here:
https://www.plex.tv/blog/beginning-look-lot-like-collections/

3

Change the album to just “Alfred Hitchcock, The Legend Begins”
leave off the “disc” part.

Are these mp4 files, by chance?

Did you add them into a “movie” type library or into a “tv show” type library?

If they are appearing in a “movie” type library, your ‘Album’ tag could have created a ‘Collection’ automatically.

4

Plex uses the Album tag from MP4/M4V files’ embedded metadata as “collection” parameter.
Those “collections” used to be only a filtering mechanism in the past. With the very latest beta release, collections actually got some proper reflection in the libraries.

As for your specific question: you can directly change this inside the Plex Web interface by deleting the “Collection” tag. This way you can also create your own collections and don’t depend on what’s found in your file’s metadata.

Question on your tagging habit… why do you include the disc # in the album name? I know that’s how iTunes does it occasionally… but don’t you have the disc X of Y discs fields for that in the MP4 container? From what I understand, the Album is made up by the entirety of the discs / songs :wink:

5

Thanks for all the quick and informative replies.

They are MP4s in the Movies library. I’ll go back and add the “disc” tag and remove the “Disc X” from the album name and see how that goes. I like the idea of a collection feature. I’ll look into it. Thanks again everyone.

6

Can we NOT make collections of a single movie please? I don’t really see the point of this, and it creates tons of noise when you have both Collections and their Contents visible.

7

You have to remove the “Album” from your movie tags or just disable the collection feature.

8

@bcrules82: 2 remarks…

  1. when editing the settings of your library you can select one of 3 options – (1) don’t show collections inline, (2) show collections inline in addition to the movies, (3) show collections inline and hide movies included in such a collection
  2. Plex doesn’t make collections of its own unless you tell it to… there’s 2 scenarios how this can happen “automatically” – (1) you have set the library to include The Movie Database group/collection information and (2) you have configured Plex to consider embedded metadata and your movies have Albums in their metadata. Deactivate those 2 settings and you’re the master of your collections (incl. deciding over which movies to put in a collection and which not