Plex new Matching logic is not working correctly

Plex Media Server
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1

5 days ago I opened a ticket about plex ‘suddenly dropping 100s of matches’. I was shamed and told it was because I had an extra folder in my movie path.

Plex latest update has MULTIPLE bugs AND I CAN PROVE IT

I have 4 movie folders. Each movie folder has various letters of the Alphabet.
For example:
Movie1, has sub folders ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, etc.
Movie2, has sub folder ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, etc.

In my library config, I list only ‘Movie1’ and ‘Movie2’, not ‘Movie1\A’, ‘Movie2\A’.

I was told (incorrectly) that this is why the matching is broken.
This is absolutely not the case.!!!

My structure DOES cause overhead, by Plex scanning media unnecessarily. I agree. But my structure is NOT the problem.

When I add an ‘A’ movie to \Movie1\A, please rescans the entire ‘A’ folder. Since my ‘A’ folder has 1,378 movies, Plex will scan AND RE-MATCH all 1,378.
This didn’t used to be a problem for 4 reasons. (thus why I never realized it was an issue)
#1) Prior to recent updates, Plex could re-scan 16,000 movies in about 30 seconds. Recent changes now have this scan running for hours, not seconds.
#2) This scan process didn’t use to re-match, matched movies, it left them alone. Now it re-matches them (and breaks them)
#3) The batch scanner matching logic has been MASSIVELY broken by a recent update
#4) When Plex dropped TheMovieDB in lieu of their own cloud database, they dropped a lot of movies. This just compounded the broken matching logic they introduced.

So yea, my folder structure is inefficient, and yea, my folder structure DOES cause Plex to re-examine movies. But if the matching logic wasn’t so broken, it wouldn’t matter.

PROOF

Create a folder.
Put in a media file ‘Summer Rental (1985)’. This is the classic John Candy movie.
Plex batch scanner will scan it, and change it to ‘The Green Ray (1986)’.
Now go online to Plex.tv, match it back to ‘Summer Rental (1985)’ (It’s a 100% match, so why did the batch scanner not find it???)
Move ANY media file into that folder with ‘Summer Rental (1985)’
Plex batch scanner will put it right back to ‘The Green Ray (1986)’

You can repeat this process over and over all day long

Another illustration of the problem:
Try ‘Salem’s Lot (1979)’. This is valid in IMDB, and TheMovieDB, but Plex does not match this, EVER.

The movie ‘An Imperfect Murder (2017)’ will match to ‘The Perfect Murder (2019)’

Put in a media file called ‘Project E.1337 ALPHA (2018)’.
The batch scanner cannot match it. (my guess, is because of the ‘:’ in the name??)
The online GUI, will hit it 100%. So match it online.
Now add a second file to that same folder.
Plex batch scanner runs again, and unmatches ‘Project E.1337 ALPHA (2018)’

BUGS (basically, 2 bugs, one with 5 components):
#1) The new plex BATCH scanner is completely broken. Online matching works fine, batch scanning is HORRIBLE.
a) Plex scanner is flat out doing incorrect matches. I have perhaps 100s of examples.
b) There are movies missing from whatever central database plex is using. IMDB has them, TheMovieDB has them, but the Plex central location does not.
c) Plex scanner is not matching movies that are clear 100% matches. This is a clear bug, because if the online GUI matches it at 100%, why is the batch scanner not matching at all?
d) Plex for whatever reason can’t do a match, that is a 100% clear match, so it just breaks the match and leaves the movie disconnected from Mata data (when it was connected and matched, before the batch scanner ran).
e) Plex will often then mark this movie as a brand new movie, and the movie then shows up as a ‘new add’ (unmatched of course).

#2) Plex will NOT let me keep my matches. This is a huge problem. Plex should NOT be breaking my matches when I manually match them. If I manually match a movie, plex should NOT be breaking this match when it scans the folder.
a) In a related topic. If I change the title (maybe I put the word ‘Extended’ in there), Plex puts a padlock on it, to indicate it is ‘locked’. However, that means nothing, because Plex will not keep my title name.

So yea, my folder structure is causing extra work.
But Plex support ought to thank me for that, I uncovered a huge bug.

In the mean time, I now have ZERO confidence in my library. Plex broke, and mis matched so many movies. I have found more than 100 examples (such as the John Candy movie) where Plex took a perfectly correct match, and matched it to something completely incorrect.

So to the folks that spent all their effort shaming me, well, looks like you were completely wrong

2

Thank you for these steps (this is exactly the kind of information that is most useful).

The issue with Summer Rental specifically has been filed, somebody is going to take a look at that tomorrow.

The issue with the unmatching behaviour is caused by having the extra A-Z folders. When we scan a folder, if it contains just one item we use the folder name as our hint for the movie title for matching. In this case it would be A or whatever.

When there is more than one item inside the folder we fall back to using the filename itself to determine the title hint. This explains why the first movie you put in gets unmatched when you add another one as the previous hint for the title was A but now it’s Name of your movie so we see that as being changed.

Any further additions to that path after this will continue to use the filename unless the A folder only has one item in it again. So this issue will only occur when there is 1 item in the path.

I’m going to see what I can do to prevent it from using paths like this, but will always recommend you follow the recommended naming here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/ to prevent further strange issues from happening. These recommendations exist for a reason as we cannot account and test for every single kind of file naming that may exist out there.

3

Just to be sure I’m clear. the issue with ‘Summer Rental’ happens to 100s of movies.
I understand the explanation on the single letter folder.
This makes it all that much more critical that you update your documentation.
Your documentation says that the movie ‘can’ reside in a folder with the same name as the movie. Based on your explanation, you need to change that to ‘MUST’. Your explanation tells me that your matching will no longer work if the movie is not in a folder by that name. so your documentation needs to be changed to reflect that.
I now have 16,000+ movies that I can’t trust any matches on.
I’m working on getting them in folders, but that’s a process and will take me a few days. I have every confidence that that will improve the situation.

You didn’t address, what I feel, is maybe the most critical bug.

Why is it that if I match a movie, Plex will override that, and unmatch it, or match it to a wrong movie.

Why can’t Plex just leave it alone when I manually match it?
Same with titles. I have ‘Extended cut’ ‘Directors Cut’, etc. These can be very different (I Am Legend actually has 2 different endings)
But due to your current change, I can no longer add this to the title., because the Plex scanner changes it to what it wants, and won’t let me keep a new title, even though the ‘padlock’ is on. It does save it, but when it scans the media, it changes it back to whatever it wants.
And in the process, unmatches it, and occasionally matches it to a different movie. Totally screwing up the works.

image

4

No, I’m not saying that. You can have single movies in one path but don’t have an extra subfolder in between. Either remove the A-Z folders or add each of those folders as a path in the library.

5

This is what my structure looks like as of today (I changed it yesterday).
If I move everything out of the single letter folder, to the ‘F:\Movies1’ folder, I’m actually going to make the situation MUCH worse. Because then I’ll have 4,000 or 5,000 movies in the same folder, and any change to 1, will rescan all.
Like I said, I plan to implement the folder name as you suggest. But my plan would still be to keep movies like ‘Summer Rental (1985)’ in a folder ‘F:\Movies4\S\Summer Rental (1985)’

image

6

In other words. I think I am doing what you are asking me to do, and it’s still a huge problem.

7

Oh, and not to belabor the point, I apologize.

There is also still an issue that whatever source you are using is missing a lot of movies, that do exist in IMDB and TheMovieDb, which is causing problems with matching as well.

It used to be that I could tell Plex to look at TheMovieDb as well as the Plex Source, but that was removed in the last update.
In rare cases, where a movie wasn’t in TheMovieDb, I would just add it myself.

Now, if the movie is not in the Plex Source, there is no possible way for me to match it. I have to leave it unmatched until someone adds it. In the case of Salem’s Lot from the 70s, that has been around for a while, there is no reason that should be missing.

8

I cannot reproduce the issue when the folders are setup like this.

Path I have added the the library F:\Movies\S.

Path of the movies:

F:\Movies\S\Summer Rental (1985).mp4
F:\Movies\S\Sunshine (1997).mp4

I added Summer Rental first, then fixed the match.
Then added Sunshine and scanned the library and everything stayed correctly matched.

9

Please link me to either the IMDB, TheMovieDB or TVDB page for this movie. We aggregate all these sources, so if it’s in one of them it should match.

10

Well, here is Salem’s Lot.

https://thetvdb.com/series/salems-lot

There are others not in there, this was just the first one off the top of my head.

11

Did this EVER match to the wrong movie for you?
Why would it consistently match to the wrong movie for me, but not for you?

I’m just on my way out the door. I’ll turn on verbose logging, and do this again after I get back.

12

These are both TV shows. They won’t match in a movie library.

13

Yes, it matched incorrectly as you reported but once I fixed it it stayed fixed.

14

There is no need to do this. Please leave this off.

15

Well, this is really my beef with the new matching logic. It DOES NOT stay on my machine. It keeps reverting back to the bad match.

16

They used to. Before you went to the Plex Centralized source, they did match to TheMovieDB

17

Update:
I just discovered yet another bug in the new Plex Movie Scanner
I just realized that Plex now only sees roughly 12,000 movies, but I have 16,000+. It used to see all 16,000

After a lot of research, I have found more than 4,000 movies that are no longer in Plex. They are where they have always been. Plex just flat out dropped them and deleted them from the library.

I even re-scanned the library, the scanner is not picking them up.

I’ve now gotten everything moved to folder’s as per the ‘suggested’ format.
I’m running a new scan now, this will take hours.

but this is yet another bug in the new Plex scanner.

This is a HUGE fail. My movie database is so toast.
You are going to have angry users everywhere.

18

Ok. I have all movies moved to their independent folders.
The plex scanner has been running for hours. I can already see, this has made ZERO improvement.

I have many 100s of examples. They are all just like this:
F:\Movies1\C\Creatures from the Abyss (2000)\Creatures from the Abyss (2000).m4v
Plex scanner cannot match this.
When I go to Plex.TV, and click ‘find match’, it matches the movie at 100%

F:\Movies1#\The 33 (2015)\The 33 (2015).m4v auto matched to Love Is a Rhombus (2014).m4v.
When I g into Plex.TV, I can’t even find ‘The 33 in any year’
IMDB https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2006295
The 33 (2015) — The Movie Database (TMDB)

I followed all recommendations, and my library is totally screwed.

You guys need to stop beating around the bush, and just admit that you totally hosed everyone using Plex.

I have almost 1/4 of my library missing.
I have 100s of non matched movies.
I have an untold number of movies that are totally screwed up.

My library is such a mess, it’s going to take me months to get this corrected.

Please TEST in the future.

And to all the damn TROLLS that were shaming people for not using the ‘correct’ file naming standard. You can all go pound sand. You were completely wrong, and rather than be part of the solution, you spent your time shaming people who were proven right.

19

Oh, and I spent many many hours renaming and moving files to be the ‘correct’ naming standard, which did no good at all, and proved, that my original method was no worse than the ‘correct’ method.
If you spent as many hours testing, as I spent finding your bug, we wouldn’t be talking

20

We didn’t. You just simply didn’t follow the naming std!

You didn’t!

We linked you towards the naming std. several times, yet you still hasn’t tried to add the relevant id!

As for a movie, in a movie library, we recommend for The 33 a folder name as:
The 33 (2015) {imdb-tt2006295}
and with the actual media below that named as:
The 33 (2015) {imdb-tt2006295} [Maybe some extra info for you, that we ignore].ext

Also note, that when renaming files, you should do a Plex Dance on the media

I can only recommend https://www.filebot.net/

But we do!
Consider the fact, that of all the users we have, only a fraction (As in numbers below 10 as far on the forums) are faced with a problem here, and one thing in common is, that they did not follow the naming standard!