According to a few comments in the forums it is/was compatible with Plex Movie Naming standards to enclose additional information inside square brackets - Plex would ignore that info.
The idea behind naming files with additional information is to keep different versions of the same movie in the same folder so they don’t collide because the filename is exactly the same. DUBBED for foreign films, REMASTERED, EXTENDED. Although I haven’t figured out to play the one I want without splitting them in Plex. Plex’s “play version” doesn’t provide enough information about the differences between the files - not the filename certainly.
If someone has a better suggestion on how to deal with multiple versions of the same movie without manually renaming them inside Plex I would like to hear it.
The Play Version capability is not meant to differentiate between Director’s Cut, Extended Version, etc. It shows if the files have different resolutions, to assist with choosing the right version for a mobile phone, SD vs HD, etc. See the Multiple Versions of the Same Movie section of Multi-Version Movies.
The best way I’ve seen to do this is to keep each version in a separate folder, as if it is a separate movie. Plex will still combine them, then you manually split them apart. Ugly, but it works.
Regarding the square brackets and metadata matching…
Plex just re-wrote the movie agent from the ground up, starting with the PMS 1.20 releases.
It would be nice for somebody from Plex (Ninja, Team Member, Employee, etc) to provide details on how the new agent responds to square brackets.
As noted in the support article you linked, starting with the 1.20.1 releases you can add the IMDB or TheMovieDB id to the folder & file names. Plex will use this info to match the movie, so how Plex responds to square brackets may be moot.
FWIW, even with the prior agent, now called “Plex Movie (Legacy)”, I do not remember the square bracket behavior being formally documented in the support articles.
FYI, it looks like adding the IMDB or TheMovieDB id to the folder & file name overrides everything, so you may not need to worry about how Plex treats info inside square brackets, at least as far as matching metadata is concerned.
I added two movies to my test library. The first one has the IMDB id for Batman Begins. The second has the IMDB id for Avatar. Plex used the IMDB ids to match the movies and pull metadata:
This works well until I use FileBot on my entire collection. It automatically removes the new folder and collapses all of the versions back into one folder and then assigns them all “part numbers”. Really annoying and no simple way to avoid that behavior when using the AMC Plex script.
