Playing One Movie, Two Different Versions Showing in "Continue Watching"

[VonSupponnatime]

Server Version#: 4.66.1
Player Version#: N/A

So until we get the feature of “Oh, you have multiple versions of the same movie? Which one would you like to play?”, I have a problem.

Stored on my NAS are two versions of the same movie: a “regular” release, and a “sing-along edition”. Each reside on two completely different volumes (my regular editions are stored on the primary NAS, and the alternate versions are in separate directories in the NAS extension unit). I’m playing the “regular” release, but when I stop it, I’m seeing both the “regular” and the “sing-along edition” under Continue Watching.

Further details:

The “sing-along edition” is named as such under “Title” and “Sort Title”, and the files themselves reflect this as well, so there should be zero(?) chance that Plex would think it’s the same movie.

For the library information, I have the regular edition under a library type of Movies, the library named “Feature Films”, and while I have the Scanner and Agent both as Plex Movie, I do have “Use local assets” and “Prefer local metadata” both checked.

Same parameters above for the alternate version, except the library is named “- Sing-Along Editions”. This helps me navigate which version I would prefer to watch when I look at my categories:

Feature Films

• Director’s Cuts
• Extended Editions
• Sing-Along Editions

(and so on)

I’ve done the Plex Dance but both versions are still showing up under “Continue Watching”.

Thoughts as to how to remedy this, aside from not having multiple versions?

Thanks in advance

[pshanew]

Regardless of how you’ve named your files or titled the item in Plex, if two movies are matched as the same movie using the same agent, they will have the same GUID in the database. Even if they are in different libraries, Plex will consider them to be the same movie (for view history, continue watching, etc…). You can see if they have the same GUID by examining the XML information for the movies.

You’ll see something like this:

In the past it was possible to work around this by matching the movies using different agents/scanners; for example, it used to be possible to Fix Match and choose TheMovieDB as the agent if your default library agent was Plex Movie, and vice versa.

However, with the new Plex Movie agent, this is no longer possible. This agent aggregates metadata from multiple sources and doesn’t allow mixing and matching with other agents. You could switch to an entirely different agent for the entire “Sing Along” library, but that would be a fairly drastic change.

The only way of which I am aware, with the new agent, to eliminate the duplicate entry from continue watching would be to exclude one or the other library from being displayed on the home screen in its advanced settings:

This won’t prevent its hubs from being shown on the home screen as that is controlled via the library’s recommendations settings.