Plex Media Server users who are using the Plex Movie and Plex TV Series (Beta) agents who have the Certification Country library setting set to anything other than United States will notice that content ratings for items in these libraries will start changing to include a country prefix.
Users with this option set to United States will not notice any change and the following information is not applicable to you.
Example:
In the example below the Certification Country is set to Germany, previously when using the Plex Movie agent for this item the Content Rating would just be stored as 12, however with this change that will now be de/12.
Before
After
The actual ratings shown elsewhere for the item should not show this country prefix, for example inside the item preplay page it will still just show 12.
Why is this changing?
If you were using one of our legacy agents previously then you may already be familiar with this format for the content rating as this is how those agents handled them. When we introduced the new agents these content ratings were never correctly serialized resulting in us losing the country information from it.
Will this change automatically?
Any new items added to your library will already be updated once this change goes into effect. Existing items in libraries before this change will have to be refreshed to reflect these changes, you can use the “Refresh All Metadata” option in the Manage Library sub-menu to refresh all items in the library.
Will I need to download a new version of Plex Media Server?
No. This change does not require any updates to Plex Media Server.
When will this change happen?
On Monday 15 March 2021 you will be able to refresh items to reflect the updated content ratings. You may notice some items changing before this date but to ensure that any cache of the old values has expired please only refresh your items on or after this date.
Does this impact me in any way?
If your Certification Country is set to United States you do not have to do anything and this change will not impact you. There is no need to manually refresh your metadata as the content ratings will remain unchanged.
Sharing restrictions
If you have Certification Country set to something other than United States then this may impact you if you have set up sharing restrictions and manually defined content ratings (see https://support.plex.tv/articles/204232573-restricting-the-shares/)
In these cases you may need to update the list of content ratings in the ALLOW ONLY RATINGS and/or EXCLUDE RATINGS fields to reflect the updated rating (e.g. updating 12 to de/12).
If you’re using one of the predefined restriction profiles (i.e. Younger Kid, Older Kid, Teen) then you do not need to make any changes as we already account for the update content ratings with these profiles.
Library filters and Smart Playlists
This change will also impact library filters using the Content Rating, if you are using any Smart Playlists and using content ratings as a filter you will need to update these too.
