Server Version#: 1.42.2.10156
My movie collection is stored under a single “Movies” folder, with each movie in its own folder. Every folder is named using the same convention, with a sequential number (which I need for my own reasons) within square brackets, followed by the movie title, then the year between round brackets, like this:
[123] Batman Begins (2005)
Isn’t Plex supposed to ignore everything within square brackets? I have reinstalled Plex recently and re-indexed my movie collection, the current Plex Movie agent was able to match 10% of my movies, at most. I switched to the legacy agent and it got probably 50%. Could it be that the new agent gets confused by the square brackets?
Also, is there a way to bulk re-match the content of a library? I know you can do it individually, movie by movie, but it’s quite tedious…
@ChuckPa: thanks for the quick reply. I confirm that the issue is the square brackets in front of the movie name. More precisely, here are the folder names I tried and the results:
[1519] Splitsville (2025) => NOT matched automatically
I can’t really move the square brackets to the end of the folder name, because it’s used for sorting (too long to explain, it’s related to a small app I developed), but at least now we know exactly what the issue is. Do you know if there is a way to report this to Plex developers?
It’s possible, I haven’t tried that. Note also that the actual MP4 file inside the folder is named exactly as the folder, save for the [nnnn] prefix. I guess the agent is using the folder name for matching the movie, not the file name…
Two reasons: it allows me to sort the movies by date added (I’m talking about Windows Explorer, not in Plex) and it’s also used by a small app I wrote ages ago, which leverages the sequential number as a way to uniquely identify each movie.
I completely acknowledge this is a very rare - if not unique - case, on the other hand the agent is supposed to ignore anything within square brackets, regardless of the position in the folder or file name, so I think there’s an argument for it being a code defect
I needed something more robust and stable than the OS “modified date”, plus my app needed an ID so I solved both problems by putting it in front of the folder name. Plex came later into the picture. Anyways, I completely accept this is a unique scenario, and I have no real expectations for the developers to fix it. It puzzles me because those brackets don’t confuse the scanner consistently, some movies get properly matched, others don’t. Moreover, the legacy movie scanner seemed to be much less affected by this.
Thank you for looking into it, much appreciated! And if they end up fixing it, super!
