I have been using Plex (along with PlexPass) for more than a year but am struggling with the covers displaying within the PMS client. When I am viewing PMS my movies are only showing as a clip from within the movie and not the standard movie cover. I only have “standard” or main stream movies in my collection so they should be in any of the databases.
I have all of my movies as standalone movies within one movie folder. Coming from Kodi, all files are named using the schema: Name.Of.Movie.(Format).(Resolution).Year.mkv or as an example Forrest.Gump.Bluray.2160P.1994.mkv.
I have seen the Plex Naming article which would like Forest Gump (1994).mkv.
However, this doesn’t allow for multiple versions of a file like a 4K version and a mobile 1080P version. Or, more specifically doesn’t let me know the file quality of a movie without look at properties of the file.
Is there any more advanced file naming supported or a way to modify Plex’s system so that it accepts files with my existing names?
I have tried the Movie Database scanner as well as the plex scanner and each get the same result. It does appear as the scanner is picking the movies up in some regard as I see the rotten tomatoes ratings and it will pull the close caption files in if desired.
So, I am not exactly sure why its not grabbing the covers. Every film just has a orange/yellow triangle in the corner. If I manually go into the movie download and assign a cover it displays.
Any help on the matter would be helpful. This affects all several hundred of my films.
Use the the naming guidelines in the article you referenced, but place any extra information in square brackets, after the year. For example:
Forest Gump (1994) [Bluray 2160p].mkv
The scanner should ignore anything inside the brackets. You can also place the IMDB or TMDB ID for the movie inside curly braces, per the article you linked:
[Edit to add]
I forgot to mention that you can see which of your movies are not matched by using “Unmatched” filter in the Library view of your movie library.
I tried renaming several of my files to the Forest Gump (1994) [Bluray 2160p].mkv schema but that still didn’t automatically make the covers appears. After this I tried re-scanning the library to see if that made a difference and it did not.
I then tried to click the bottom right corner of the movie file and choosing to “fix match” or “match”. For most all of the titles the correct movie was showing as the first option. I simply clicked it and the covers shows properly.
So, while I have fully fixed my entire library by hand I wonder why it wasn’t picking them up when it clearly was finding the correct movie and even using the common naming scheme it still wasn’t working.
Sometimes, if Plex Media Server get confused enough, a simple rename and re-scan doesn’t do it. In those cases the Plex Dance is often needed. It’s easier to do a few movies by hand (as you did); but for correcting many movies, it’s likely quicker to dance them.
