Personal Media Scanner failing to load Originally Available date

[jjharrow]

Server Version#: 1.41.3.9314
Player Version#: n/a

I added some new home videos (mp4) to my library for 2024 and they were failing to proper load the “Originally Available” from either the file metadata (Year property), or the folder path or file name – i.e. “/HHV #2024 (2024)/HHV #2024 - The Year (2024).mp4” this used to work fine. I then unfortunately did a “Library->Manage Library->Refresh All Metadata” which then wiped out all the dates on the files that used to be there. Everything now has a date of 1969-12-31 (i.e. unset).

Looking at the media scanner logs, I now see an error for every file:
Jan 01, 2025 19:54:21.202 [11272] WARN - [FFMPEG] - stream 0, timescale not set
Jan 01, 2025 19:54:21.213 [11272] ERROR - [Time] Date looks invalid: 2006–1–1

Scanner config was:
Scanner: Plex Video Files Scanner
Agent: Personal Media

I also tried:
Scanner: Plex Video Files
Agent: Plex Personal Media

which behaved the same.

This seems to match Bug Report: Personal Media Agent fails to read year metadata from MP4 file type from 4 years ago.

Seems like the date loading regressed in the past year or so?

Using “Refresh Metadata” on any item causes it to loose the date.
Using “Analyze” seems to have it get file modification date.

Any suggestions?

[jjharrow]

Apparently, now the personal media scanner does not honor the “year” or the “(year)” in the file name. It only uses the “Media created” date. You can set it on Windows in the Details tab of the file Properties dialog.

I tried to write a script to set it from the year field, but accessing file metadata is apparently pretty tricky. I found some examples in powershell, but couldn’t get them to work, so I ended up manually applying the “Media created” for all 500+ of my videos. Sigh.