Newbie questions about libraries and metadata

General Discussions
1

Two questions:

  1. I have a very large library spread across multiple disks and folders. When I add them the Plex I get one library/folder, is there a way to get a consolidated view. For example, my move collection is on three different 3TB drives at the moment, I see those as three separate libraries in Plex, what I would like is a single consolidated view with all the movies displayed regardless of which physical disk they live on.

  2. My entire library has been built for Kodi and has all the Metadata and artwork already gathered. However, in PLEX, most of the artwork is missing, i.e. movie posters aren’t showing up etc. Should PLEX be able to pickup the existing .nfo files, posters etc?

2

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:

  1. I have a very large library spread across multiple disks and folders. When I add them the Plex I get one library/folder, is there a way to get a consolidated view.

Edit your first movie library and add the drive letters/folder paths of the other drives as well

  1. Should PLEX be able to pickup the existing .nfo files, posters etc?

By default, Plex (almost) doesn’t care about .nfo files.
If you want that, you need to install the 3rd party .nfo importer agents

3

Sounds like your drive logic outside of plex is probably poor. Look into a JBOD or RAID0 setup to simplify local addressing.

4

OK, library is mostly sorted now. One other question, I see that some of my movies haven’t been picked up, is there a simple way to generate a report for all the movie folders that Plex didn’t manage to include in the library, I suspect there may be some file naming issues that I need to fix.

5

@Bramleigh said:
Sounds like your drive logic outside of plex is probably poor. Look into a JBOD or RAID0 setup to simplify local addressing.

Thanks, but my movie/TV library is ~35TB and I’ve found that maintaining individual drives with offline backups is the simplest solution for me. Problem was solved by the previous poster who mentioned how to add multiple drives to the Movie library and that worked a treat.

6

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
OK, library is mostly sorted now. One other question, I see that some of my movies haven’t been picked up, is there a simple way to generate a report for all the movie folders that Plex didn’t manage to include in the library, I suspect there may be some file naming issues that I need to fix.

http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1320590/#Comment_1320590

7

One more question, I have a couple of entries showing up with a number in a blue circle on top of the poster art. For example I have two separate directories, one for each part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. On my Kodi system these show up as two separate entries, but on Plex it looks like it’s combining them, is there any way to stop Plex from doing this?

8

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
On my Kodi system these show up as two separate entries, but on Plex it looks like it’s combining them, is there any way to stop Plex from doing this?

Nope. It’s a feature. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200381043-Multi-Version-Movies
Only the right file naming will stop this.

9

@OttoKerner said:

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
On my Kodi system these show up as two separate entries, but on Plex it looks like it’s combining them, is there any way to stop Plex from doing this?

Nope. It’s a feature. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200381043-Multi-Version-Movies
Only the right file naming will stop this.

OK, so what would I do with file names to stop this?

10

Tell me how it is now and I tell you how you must change it.

11

@OttoKerner said:
Tell me how it is now and I tell you how you must change it.

Thanks. For the two parts of Henry IV they are:
Henry IV(1)/Henry IV Part1.mkv
Henry IV(2)/Henry IV - Part II.mkv

12

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
Thanks. For the two parts of Henry IV they are:
Henry IV(1)/Henry IV Part1.mkv
Henry IV(2)/Henry IV - Part II.mkv

Is this a kind of tv series or a multi-part movie? i.e. are there occurences of this on the IMDb or TheMovieDB or even TheTVDB?
How do you want to watch this? Do you want to be able to watch each part individually or would you prefer to view all the parts continuously in one session?

13

@OttoKerner said:

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
Thanks. For the two parts of Henry IV they are:
Henry IV(1)/Henry IV Part1.mkv
Henry IV(2)/Henry IV - Part II.mkv

Is this a kind of tv series or a multi-part movie? i.e. are there occurences of this on the IMDb or TheMovieDB or even TheTVDB?
How do you want to watch this? Do you want to be able to watch each part individually or would you prefer to view all the parts continuously in one session?

These are recordings of the Royal Shakespeare Company productions released on Bluray, they don’t seem to have IMDB entries, I seem to recall manually creating their Kodi NFO files. I would like to watch them as two separate entities.

14

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
I seem to recall manually creating their Kodi NFO files. I would like to watch them as two separate entities.

If you have Kodi-compatible .nfo files, then use the nfo import plugin like I initially suggested.

Otherwise, I suggest avoid having part 1 as the last part of a folder and/or file name.
(because of this feature: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200264966-Naming-Stacked-or-Multi-Part-Movies )

So I guess this might work:

Movies /
   Henry IV part one (year) /
      Henry IV part one (year).mkv
   Henry IV part two (year) /
      Henry IV part two (year).mkv

if done this way, these files will be treated like two completely independent ‘movies’.

If you want to utilise the ‘stacked files’ feature, thus getting one movie that plays the two parts continuously, the naming needs to be like this:

Movies /
   Henry IV (year) /
      poster.jpg
      Henry IV (year) - Part 1.mkv
      Henry IV (year) - Part 2.mkv

If this is not in any of the online databases, I suggest adding the poster/cover as a sidecar file.

15

Thanks Otto, I appreciate the help, I’ve come to know how to wrangle Kodi’s meta data system pretty well, but Plex was new to me and I appreciate the help.

16

So I tried renaming them as suggested and it had no effect, there’s obviously somethings I still need to learn about Plex. Just to make sure, I removed them from the library then added them back.

17

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
Just to make sure, I removed them from the library then added them back.

You had the right idea here, but in Plex it takes a little bit more: the Plex Dance

18

So, tried that, slightly different result. I still only have a single entry, but now, instead of there being a blue circle with 2 displayed on the entry, there is what appears to be some sort of folder icon (stacked squares) in the top left corner.

19

@nik.simpson@gmail.com said:
So, tried that, slightly different result. I still only have a single entry, but now, instead of there being a blue circle with 2 displayed on the entry, there is what appears to be some sort of folder icon (stacked squares) in the top left corner.

This is just on the main page of Plex Web.
If you into the library, you’ll see the number as usual.

Well, I guess you have to split them manually.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201018248-Merge-or-Split-Items

20

I recently recorded ‘Great Performances’ for what is going to be a multi-part thing ‘The Hollow Crown Henry VI’, but that will go in a TV Show Library as it’s listed at TVDB under Great Performances - of all things, but there are listings for Henry IV at TMDB which should - if all goes according to plan - list them as separate items:

Henry IV Part 1 (2015)

Henry IV part 2 (2015)

… and indeed it does:

I suppose this bodes the question: Are these the Henry IVs we’re talking about?
If not, disregard.
If so, don’t you just hate it when the guy that listed these at TMDB didn’t use the same letter case for part 2 as he did for part 1?
(as a member I suppose I could change that - but I won’t - hard to say what ill effects that may have on someone’s match out there in the world somewhere)

:slight_smile: