I typically add a movie to my Movies library and any extra video to subdirectories like Behind the Scenes, Interviews, etc. I have already transcoded. Later, as more extra videos finish transcoding from disk, I add them.
Only, I find that, unless I add all that extra video ahead of time before asking Plex to Scan Library Files for the new movie, the extras I try to add later are ignored by Plex’ scan, which completes in a second or two at most.
I’m afraid to use Refresh Metadata because a) I don’t think extra video falls under metadata and b) the last thing I want to do is lose previous metadata work that I’ve done by hand (when agent-produced metadata is grossly inadequate, an all-too-often occurrence).
Refresh Metadata is indeed the method used to pick the additional material (trailers, deleted scenes, interviews, et al…) that you’ve added to your movie’s folder. Doing so should not affect your manual metadata changes provided that:
The movie is properly matched.
You have locked any fields you’ve changed for that item (orange lock to the left of the field). This happens by default when you change a field and, if unlocked for some reason, the changes revert anyway:
You can verify (1) by using the “Unmatched” filter in the Library view for that library.
Having said this, you may want to do a quick test on the next movie you add. Before making extensive modifications to its metadata, make small one and then add the extras and refresh metadata. You can then verify that your changes were preserved.
“Refresh Metadata” is the right action to use when adding “sidecar” files.
Because all sidecar files are handled by the ‘Local Media Assets’ metadata agent. And metadata agents only pick up changes on already existing items if you refresh the metadata.
(This applies to external subtitles as well.)
You only need to refresh metadata on the particular movie.
Don’t do it on the whole library.
