I currently run Kodi but have installed Plex so I’m using my Kodi libraries which have pretty much the same naming convention.
The problem I’m experiencing is Plex not ‘scraping’ all my movies. Out of 1410 movies Plex misses 19. I discovered that one of the movies that wasn’t scraped was actually ‘assigned’ to another movie. When I ‘matched’ the original movie to its correct title the other incorrectly assigned movie became unmatched. Then when I tried to match that movie the original movie became unassigned again. If I watch the now ‘matched’ movie it is actually the original movie that is unassigned and unmatched.
The movie titles aren’t close and Kodi has no problem scraping any of the movies using TMDB.
Any ideas of how to resolve this would be appreciated.
Movie 1 is 9
Movie 2 is Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
In folders movie 1 has the title of movie 2 but the rest of the data (run time and description) is for movie 1. Movie 1 is not listed in movies but I can find it in folders.
If I select movie 2 to play, it will actually play movie 1. If I re-assign movie 1 (with its proper poster) it will show up in movies but movie 2 will be gone.
movie 1 hierarchy is: E://Movies/9/9.mkv
movie 2 hierarchy is: E://Movies/Once Upon A Time In Hollywood/Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.mkv
I have 1413 movies and 1399 show up in movies. 14 movies are not shown but are listed in folders.
You should add at least the release year of each movie in parentheses.
In the special case of “9”, you might want to help Plex to be more certain about the match. Because a file name that consists of exactly one 1-digit number could be also almost anything.
So make that at least E://Movies/9 (2009)/9 (2009).mkv
If you want to achieve an even safer match, use E://Movies/9 (2009) {imdb-tt0472033}/9 (2009).mkv instead.
OttoKerner, I appreciate you taking time and patience to help me.
There are several points that I think are important to make.
I have 1413 movies and to go through them all making the changes you suggest would be extremely exhausting especially when Kodi has no problem recognizing all the movies correctly.
Another point is why would all the data concerning 9 be correct (year, run time, description) and yet it still assigned to another movie with that movie’s poster?
I have assigned TMDB to be my scraper and when you go to TMDB to search for 9 in movies it is the very first hit even though there are 1038 movies with 9 in them. Try it for yourself.
The 1st I will try is determining what the other 14 missing movies are and see if some pattern emerges.
My interest in trying Plex was my initial impression that it was faster serving remote devices than is Kodi but if it doesn’t work properly there is no point.
I will add the year to 9 and see what happens especially how it affects Once a Time in Hollywood.
Its a matter of the Plex scanner confusing files. If you want an easy way to cleanup your files Ill copy/paste my standard response. files like 9.mkv are so vague that it Plex takes a random stab in the dark at matching with poor results. I would Plex Dance the affected files using:
If you want to save yourself a lot of time I would recommend using Download - tinyMediaManager and use ${title} (${year}) {imdb-${imdb}} as the new name format.
If 1399 movies already showing up correctly, there is no need to rename these.
Maybe there is an .nfo file in the same folder which has an incorrect IMDB ID in it?
Plex is using the IMDb ID as a strong matching hint. (and it’s the only thing it does read from an .nfo file)
Well after adding the year to the title I was able to get 9 assigned correctly. I did have reassign Once Upon…Hollywood but it took and now I am only missing 13 movies.
The tough part is figuring which 13 movies are the ones missing. Kodi gives you a visual indicator if a movie is not included but I can’t tell with Plex what is and what isn’t assigned.
I was able to find 9 because it is early in the folder list and movie list and it’s one of my most favorite movies.
I am also missing 2 TV series and I will identify those because there are so many fewer and it should be that much a chore.
When using TMM it defaults to the movie database names. I do not think it supports the tmdb id like it does for imdb.
If you want an easy way to check matching. Once you get the imdb id added to all the file names you can use a program like WebTools-NG which lets you get an export of the plex database. Then all you need to do is compare the matched imdb id to the file name.
As for missing movies, plex almost always indexes everything. However it does often flag stuff it cant parse correctly as a duplicate, so take a look in your library for those. (there is filter for that)
OttoKerner, reading through that thread has given me several ideas to look for…especially the HP Deathly Hollows part1/2 which causes Kodi problems too.
As I am trying t find the missing files, I have noticed that several files report they are Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. First it was the movie 9, which I fixed by adding the date to the title but now it’s Blade Runner 2049. I added the date to the title of that but it will not fix to Blade Runner 2049. It insists on being Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It sits right next to the real Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) with the year being the correct year for Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
What is so special with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and why does it match so many of my titles?
Do you (or did you at one time in the past) download or transcode directly into the folder which is being watched by Plex for media?
If so: don’t. Always use a “staging folder” for this kind of thing which is outside the scope of Plex.
Then perform the Plex dance with all movies involved in the mixup (including “Once Upon a Time…”).
Add them back only one by one.
I use Handbrake to create the file/folder on a different system, then move (sneaker-net) the file/folder to my media server as the directories on my server are read only. The directory I use on the media server is the same for Plex and Kodi.
It would be a lot easier if Plex would indicate in the folder view which items are not matched as Kodi does. It would also be easier if the sorting sequence was the same between the 2 systems. There is no consistency so it makes matching the lists very difficult and time consuming. At least Plex follows the same sort sequence in folder view as Windows so maybe I’ll just use that to identify which files are not matched.
I’m not sure what the ‘Plex Dance’ will accomplish as I don’t really relish the idea of moving 1400+ files from one directory to another only to potentially end up in the same situation…but I might. I just have to think of how it might effect my Kodi data base.
What I can’t understand is why there are so many mismatches. I just found The Call of The Wild was listed as something entirely different.
Thanks for sticking with me on getting this resolved.
I would really stress looking into your naming structure. I use the ${title} (${year}) {imdb-${imdb}} format for my library and the number of match issues I run into is really minimal. (1-2 per 1,000 files)
When cleaning up the file names you will need to do the plex dance otherwise plex may just see the file renamed and not try to rematch it to the correct movie.
Renaming that with tools like Tiny Media Manger is fairly easy. I can do it in a couple hours. (My library is quite a bit larger than yours and getting the media into a consistent complaint state will save you a LOT of work)
