I thought of something else: I renamed the file to "Crime à S01E01 - Premier episode de ma serie”. The metadata remained the same — the proper name for the series and episode were still there, but Plex ignored them and displayed "Crime à” instead, illustrating that PMS is not prioritizing the metadata embedded in the file.
Thanks for the detailed info, much appreciated.
Just note that we’ll never match a show using embedded info, only the file path matters here. So if you name the path to something that can be matched we’ll use that. The embedded show tag will never get used here.
The issue with the thumbnail changing is something that shouldn’t be happening when there is an embedded one available, I can open an issue for that.
I wish there was a way to always prioritize the embedded data. And even though I knew the naming for the file was key for matching, I didn’t know the name of the subfolder where the file is located had an impact too.
That being said, in addition to the cover-art/poster/thumbnail issue, I also noticed that some of the embedded metadata like the actors, are also never used.
Corentin
While it’s possible to implement this, it’s quite a large chunk of work for something that extremely few people would actually use, and would cause a lot of confusion for anyone who enabled this accidentally (as their file tags wouldn’t be properly curated).
In the sample you sent me the actor data is being pulled through. The web client just doesn’t display actors at the episode level.
Well in my case it’s the file tags that are really curated 
I find the preferences confusing then. It shouldn’t imply that metadata have the precedence in the advanced preferences:
Clearly here, it does not “prefer embedded tags”, The file path and name has the precedence.
Having things match off their tags also introduces a whole lot of complexities.
For example, if somebody has placed files inside a show folder and expect to see it that way inside Plex but if the embedded tags are not consistent with all the files it can result in those files getting split up into multiple different shows.
Basically it just has the potential to cause more confusion for people who unknowingly set this preference (which I have seen plenty of) then to actually help anyone. As I’ve stated, if somebody is going through the effort to tag all their files, I would assume they would ensure the folder names are also consistent.
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Sure… But then why even have this preference at all since it’s not respected? PMS doesn’t prefer embedded tags obviously.
What does the preference do?? If it’s only for certain tags, it should be clarified in the UI…
The episode title, summary, release date, content rating, thumbnail and people (like actors, directors, etc) will be used.
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Thanks for your patience and for clarifying these aspects @drzoidberg33!
Could you please provide a working example for this for tvshows with the new agent? I tried several solutions I found on the internet but none of them worked. Most times the examples were written for older agents or simply copied from other forums.
A sample is provided above which I used (from this reply: PMS not using the metadata embedded in my MP4 files - #20 by cortig)
Library has “Prefer local metadata” enabled.
As mentioned previously, episode actors only show on clients that support this (like iOS):
Unfortunately, there I can find only an example with the GUI of some apple program.
To make these fields usable I need to find out what happens behind the gui.
I found some postings about an xml structure inside one specific tag, but never got this working, so I guessed it was again for older agents.
Are you talking about apps that allow you to view and edit the metadata on mp4 files?? Thee are a bunch. A quick search on Windows pointed me to MyMeta. I’m sure there are many others.
There are a bunch I know on macOS X (iFlicks, MetaZ, Subler……).
And a number of players read and use the metadata, including the media players from Windows and macOS X. (You can even edit the metadata from within the TV app on macOS X).
For simple cases I use mp4tag, but to tag complete shows and seasons I use a selfmade tool which gets the correct tvdb data and puts it in the embedded fields to get rid of the TMDB rubbish.
This works well except for cases where even the showname in TMDB is wrong, e.g. Augsburger Puppenkiste.
But to write the right data to the right field, I need to know which field is used by plex and how the data for actors is structured.
I tried to write an xml structure to a field as I found it in the web but that didn’t work. So I hoped to get a working example of field and data.
Found the answer for the correct xml myself.
Putting it in the ITUNMOVI tag puts Director, Writer, Producer etc. in the right fields.
And for movies, it also works for the actors. Great, so far.
But…
For the TV Shows, where I need it most to fix problems with TMDB rubbish, it fails.
It would work for guest stars on single episodes, but they are not displayed on most clients (yet, I hope).
But I did not find a clue how to assign the main cast to a whole show. So there are still so many shows where cast, description, not even the title can be fixed.
Sigh.
FYI, I’m seeing it once in a while on different movies.
•The file has an embedded Cover Art, but it’s not used.
• Plex fails to find one and then simply doesn’t display anything at all.
(the file name was: All the President’s Men (1976) {tmdb-532163464}.mp4)
I can sometimes correct the issue by displaying the details for the movie: Plex will re-perform the matching/search and add a cover art then — although it shouldn’t have been needed since the file already had one embedded.
Corentin
All the President’s Men (1976) {tmdb-532163464}.mp4
That’s not the TMDB ID for that movie. Is it matched correctly? If you look at the XML for that movie, what’s the first guid:// entry?
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/891-all-the-president-s-men?language=en-US
891!
I see that too… I didn’t enter the tmdbs ID manually. I had it automatically input by iFlicks (and after investigation, it looks like it used the Apple catalog ID number instead of the tmdb one I had asked for).
That being said, Plex should still have used the embedded cover art (and did not!)
The XML data mentions:
guid="local://18552”
for the first guid entry.
Corentin
Hrm. It isn’t matched correctly.
I know that IDs in filenames take very high precedence in the matching process.
I wonder if that’s also short-circuiting the metadata extraction. Maybe @drzoidberg33 has a hint.
If you rename the can’t-be-matched filename (and Plex Dance it, maybe) does it pull local metadata how you expect?
It looks like the reply I posted way back never showed up here (I must have missed something).
I tried the Plex Dance and it unfortunately didn’t make any difference.
The file had no cover art in Plex. Not even the embedded one :’-(
