Is it possible to prevent plex from auto-merging the movies you’re adding to the system?
because if I for example have director’s cut and theatrical, maybe a restored quality, of the same movie, I would prefer to have them splitted (so I can have different covers), and I don’t like that plex is auto-merging them, because I always have to split them.
And at the moment I’ve just (re)fixed my system, (new clean installation) and are about to letting my 12tb be accessed by plex (and indexed), and would appreciate to NOT have to split all movies again…
No, it is not possible. You will have to unmerge them manually. Or name one of the files so differently that PMS can’t match it and you’ll have to match it manually.
Edit - Note that you cannot have the same movie matched twice using the same agent. You’ll need to either use a different agent for the 2nd movie or leave the movie unmatched and enter the data manually.
I mean if you have Aliens and it was matched using the Plex Movie agent, and you add another version of Aliens, PMS will use the default agent you set for your library to match this new version. If the default is Plex Movie, then this version gets matched and merged with the previous version. When you split them, PMS removes the matching from 1 of these versions. So 1 is matched and the other is left unmatched. This way you can have multiple versions, but since it’s unmatched, you won’t get the metadata for it. You can then manually “match” this unmatched version and change the agent to TheMovieDB. PMS will show this 2nd Aliens using TheMovieDB agent, so you can have 2 versions. But they will be totally independent of each other since they were matched using different agents.
Hmm. Looks like things have changed since I last tested this.
Now when I split a movie, it doesn’t unmatch the items, so I end up with duplicates of the movie. Each is still matched and has the same metadata. You can edit each individually without affecting the other.
I guess it is possible to have matched versions of the movie. However, since they are still using the same matching, the play progress is the same for both items.
ok, well that causes an issue, survivable, but still an issue. I had worse for a couple of weeks ago, when it somehow had the same play progress on all episodes in a serie, so I had to write up which one I was on…
isn’t all movies identified by uin? (unique identification number) or something else?
Yes, movies are identified by a unique ID. In Plex, it’s the GUID, which you can see if you call up the XML info for a video. That GUID is unique to the agent used, so using the same agent will result in the same GUID. And progress is tracked by the GUID, not the file, which leads to the same progress for all items.
what about movies you have in Seperate languages? I want those movies to display their proper name (in the right language) I cannot do this if Plex keep merging them… is there a naming scheme I could use for this? since they are already named in their proper languages, Plex just doesn’t seem to care…
yes, I’m saying that for either of the movies the moment I try to refresh metadata, it will immediately merge it into the other one… so I never have the chance to fix match, or unmatch, since they are merged again
these are actually self ripped dvd’s so that’s why I’m asking if there is a naming scheme to prevent the merging… Zootropolis.mvk and Zootopia.mvk for instance where zootropolis is the ducht version and Zootopia the English one (the new Plex Movie agent btw)
I created files with those names. They were initially merged together, but when I chose Split Apart, they split apart as expected.
If I Scan... or Refresh... them, they stay split apart. Nothing I do has caused them to merge back together.
If I manually edit metadata, or change posters, those changes continue to affect the movies separately.
However, if I edit the Advanced settings for Metadata language or Use Original Title, those changes are applied to BOTH movies.
That means that any future Refresh Metadata will affect the unlocked fields of both movies, turning them into the same language. Locking fields seems to work as a workaround.
But I can’t seem to make them merge back together except by doing so deliberately.
hmmz… I’ll give locking the fields a shot… not really sure where you can set language info and then lock them, because the moment I choose Match to choose for instance the Dutch name for one of the movies, it immediately merges them both back, while I did not touch the other one… so that one being in a seperate folder makes it hard to understand the approach plex is taking here…
It sounds like something is behaving differently for you, and I’m not sure why. Once I’ve split movies apart, they only re-merge if I Match them to the same movie again. Otherwise they stay separate and I can edit them separately.
locking fields didn’t change it really… I wouldn’t mind plex linking them together if it would let me chose the language when playing, but that’s unfortunately not the case… one of them gets hidden no matter what…
