Folks (long one…sorry…but I figure some of the details may be relevant),
Plex newb here. I combed the help forums prior but couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for so here I am. I recently purchased a Synology 220+ to up my game and network my collection. My prior experience is with running Kodi on a KDLINKS A400 connected to a single TV.
I have a substantial movie collection and have it well organized and everything named to the common standard “Movie Title (year) [quality]” but with 2 nuances. First, there’s a number or parent folders to get through: “Adult’s Movies” vs “Kid’s Movies”, then subs like “Adult’s Movie’s - Comedy”, etc. I know this isn’t really necessary if you’re using something like Plex but I’d prefer to keep the structure and frankly Plex seems to be handling this part just fine. Second, with certain collections, I added a number to the beginning of the folder/movie title to list them in release order (like my “Jackass” collection). The numbers have only been added to the folders; the movie file within does not include it. In 95% of these cases, Plex appears to have scanned the movie media file itself (vs the folder title) and properly pulled the associated metadata. But in the other 5%, it lists the movie with the preceding number indicating it’s from the associated folder, fails to then find a metadata match, names it with the folder name, and pulls a random frame from the media to display.
Can anyone explain this inconsistent behavior and if there’s a way to fix it (beyond removing all the numbers)? With Kodi, I could deselect a option that said “files are named the same as parent folder” and then the program would only consider the media files themselves"
The only explanation that I have is that Plex will always work when things are named and structured correctly. It’s hit and miss when it’s not. Plex expects to see titles without preceeding numbers, so if/when it works, you’re lucky.
Using the matching id within {} from either imdb or tmdb will ensure plex uses that to get a match. You can then (in theory) name the folders anything you wish, as assuming the id is correct for the movie you have it will be used to get a match.
An alternative to what @anon5074910 suggested is to have a .nfo file for each movie, named exactly the same. That .nfo file just needs to have the IMDB (or TMDB ID, I think) inside, and you’ll have a guaranteed match, regardless of how your movie file is actually named.
Thanks everyone for all your help. I just stumbled on another solution too. If you click on the 3-dot menu option (bottom right on the movie’s image as you hover your cursor over it), you can select from “match”, “fix match”, or “unmatch” (some options won’t appear until applicable). When you click on “match”, plex pops-up a screen with the most likely ones and in almost every case, the top one was the movie it should be. Select it and…booya!..fixed!
Not sure if this is a new or recent feature but it beats manually changing file names or creating/adding additional ones.
Ill challenge that statement. My standard reponse to naming issues is below, I can fix hundreds of files per hour this way. Unless you have an extremely large library this should let you fix them in a couple of hours:
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.
That would be my last resort. I prefer having them named right as over the years I’ve moved things around, upgraded, and done a few other things that required recreating my libraries from scratch. The less work I have to clean up after that, the better.
