Hi All, I have a the Plex server running on a Synology NAS with music, TV & Movie files.
The movie files (about 1700 of them) live in alphabetical folders, some files live in sub folders, e.g. James Bond. Yesterday I noticed that a couple of MKV files were not appearing in PLEX. The files were named like this: Golden Eye1995.mkv.
Two questions.
Is there anything I can do regarding the naming of the files to make Plex recognise them?
Is there a simple way of searching for problem files like that so they can be modified or an alternative version can be created?
Many thanks in advance.
Use the naming convention outlined in the Plex support article. In particular, it prefers to have the name be something like GoldenEye (1995).ext, where .ext is the file extension (in your case, .mkv). The names are checked against the names as seen on TheTVDB.com, so try to match the name as closely to it as you can. After the movie name, include the release year of the video in parenthesis (according to TheTVDB. Some movies released years before coming to the US, and it wants the ORIGINAL release year, not the US year), with a space between the last word in the title and the year. If your file was Golden Eye1995, the Plex movie matcher got confused because of the space in the name and no space between the name and year.
There are a few ways to check which videos may not have been added correctly. In the movie library, click on the word *All in the top left of the movie grid, with a down arrow next to it. This is the area you can set to change sort order or even filter out movies of a particular type. When you click on *All, pick the option ~5 lines down called Unmatched. This will show all movies in your library that it failed to match due to a bad name. You can then manually attempt to “Match” them one by one. If it failed to match automatically, the filename is likely incorrect, so I’d recommend you fix the filename too.
I’d suggest you also check another filter under the All drop down, called Duplicates. This will show any movie that Plex thinks you have two copies of. This can happen if the two files both “matched” to the same video. Movie remakes, like “The Italian Job” might combine if you don’t use the proper naming scheme with the year release date like above. If any videos show up here and you are SURE you have only one copy of that movie, choose the option in Plex (the triple dot button on the movie poster) to “Split” the movie into two entries. Take note of the movie you did this to, as they will likely vanish from this filter list because they are no longer “duplicates”. Go back to the All dropdown choice in the upper left to find the movies. Click Get Info in the triple dot menu for the movie to see the filename for this entry. If the file name does not match up with the poster/metadata entry, then you will need to Fix Match in the triple dot menu for the movie to correct it.
Fix Match is a useful option to get used to. If any movie is incorrectly matched to the wrong year, or even an entirely different movie than it should be, use that option to fix the movie. If you added 1700 movies and got some movies that didn’t match, you are also likely to have some movies be incorrectly matched. There may be some tools that can look at Plex and determine if any movies were incorrectly matched, but I don’t have any experience with them. If you know your library well, you can just scan through it yourself and go “I don’t remember having that movie before!” to find a wrong match.
Many thanks for your most helpful advise. I read that in a perfect world each movie would be in its own folder, together with poster and subtitles. Do you know of any utility that can automate this kind of task?
I do not know. I believe there may be tools to automate such organization, but I only keep the movies themselves, no other additional media like posters. I use internal subs in MKV container. And all my movies are mostly lumped together in a giant folder, occasionally with movie groups in sub-folders within that large folder. It works.
If someone sees this, maybe they can share the names of apps that can help automating proper name schemes and organization for movies?
