Just to give a different perspective … that wasn’t my experience at all.
I find the new scanner to be dramatically faster and more reliable. It does a better job at providing clean artwork. The ability to embed IDs in folder & filenames is useful.
When upgrading, all of these things were fine for me:
Manually-matched movies were preserved
Manually selected posters were preserved
Manually changed (locked) metadata was preserved
Collections were preserved
Watch history was preserved
I did a test just now, creating a Library with the old agent and then upgrading it. I let it complete, and confirmed that all of those scenarios worked OK.
I noticed that upgrading one Library triggered a Metadata Refresh in other Libraries as well … but with no ill effects.
Which isn’t to say it didn’t happen to you. I wonder if there was some other issue in the Library, or if additional changes were made while the migration occurred?
Just to give a different perspective … that wasn’t my experience at all.
Well thanks, that’s actually really helpful too - if I understood incorrectly I’m happy to be corrected, so let me confirm (what you basically just said)
In my main “All” movie library I have just under 5000 films. I’ve created about 200 “Collections” (adding all those tags manually) and have edited the name and sorting text for hundreds if not over a thousand items. I’ve merged in about 1000 4K version as I used to keep those separate, many of which I had to manually merge. As for TV I’ve even created a few “custom” shows, where I edited the name, season, episode titles, descriptions, etc. for over 200 episodes. I can’t lose all this, obviously.
So if we’re saying that it’s highly unlikely those things would be lost and there is benefit - not only performance but being on a non-legacy feature that at some point will certainly be forced upon us - I guess I’ll give it a go. I do have daily backups and can run one before I do it - so?
Can you confirm I will not / should not lose the following:
All edits to items (titles, tags, sorting, etc)
Hundreds of custom Collections
Over 1000 merged files (4K with 1080p versions)
Hundreds of episodes of “custom” shows with titles, descriptions, seasons, etc all custom edited
If so I’ll run a backup and give it a go and report back, thanks for the help here guys, we all know this is complex and important that it be handled correctly.
Any locked fields should be preserved. After editing a field it should be locked by default.
Same. Membership in a Collection is identified by the Collections tag. That should be locked too. I didn’t have any issue with mine, and manual collections were preserved when I tested again just now.
You may want to prevent automatic collections from being created. See the Library Advanced settings, Minimum automatic collection size.
I didn’t have a ton of these when I did my main Library upgrade, but I did test with one just now, and it was fine.
I expect this to be fine. From a database perspective, files are linked to Library Items. Upgrading the agen’t doesn’t cause matched files to be un-linked or re-matched.
What do you mean? What’s a “custom” show?
Are these items that couldn’t be matched, or things like home movies?
Upgrading the agen’t doesn’t cause matched files to be un-linked or re-matched.
THIS is the key point here - and from what we’re seeing that seems to be the case but it’s critical to know if it is. I do think at this point it’s worth moving forward, I’ll do so later this evening. My Plex server folder is just under 100GB, I emptied the photo transcoder cache and can shave about 15 GB or so off that. Regardless it’ll take a while to backup. (as a side note, so happy we don’t have tape backups anymore, I lived with those for years, decades actually…)
What do you mean? What’s a “custom” show?
Meaning I added a folder with files I named “Star.Trek.DS9.Dominion.War.S01E01.Episode.MP4” etc then edited all the tags/data for each of the files (that one has 50 episodes) so they show in Plex just like any other “real” show, but if I filter by “unmatched” it does show up - that’s my fear, that it’ll say “hey, unmatched, let’s “fix” that for you!!!”
I also can setup a separate library and reproduce one “episode” and test for myself, just has to be in a few hours.
Thanks for the back and forth on this, I imagine others will start getting this as it seems they just rolled this out?
I saw this same dialog… and when I clicked “Upgrade Libraries” I got a failure dialog that disappeared and now I have an “Up Arrow” on my dashboard that won’t go away…
This new database messed up some of my TV series seasons and episodes. When it used THETVDB you could go to that website and figure out why there were mismatches, Does a website exist for the new PLEX site so one can go there and sort things out?
I upgraded my movie ones earlier, but did the big tv library today, and manually refreshed some shows. My one problem is that the Studio is being changed to something uncommon.
For example, According to Jim had the studio as ABC (US) and I could click on that to see all the ABC (US) shows, now it’s “Newman/Stark” like really? And AP Bio, which should either say NBC or Peacock, now say Broadway Video
Technically I’m on linux but doesn’t seem os dependent.
I haven’t tested this either. I’m curious to hear what you find.
I have previously noticed edge cases for metadata and unmatched media - editing metadata BEFORE a show is matched can cause it to be lost when it is matched.
It sounds like it isn’t matched. I definitely think you should test.
One nice trick with the new agents is that you can embed the show ID in the folder/file name to guarantee a match, without having to do Fix Match.
Why did you edit them all manually? Why not follow the file naming scheme and let Plex pull the metadata for the show?
The new agents have been the default for new Libraries for a long time. It’s been possible to upgrade for quite a while. The prompt and “encouragement” to upgrade is new.
It’s actually showing the studio, rather than a broadcast network or distribution company.
I thought there was a feature suggestion for this, but I don’t immediately see one. There’s this discussion about it:
thanks for your feedback, guys. I almost feared this would happen. I am for sure staying away from “upgrading” my libraries. a good backup of my plex folders is always handy.
This agent “upgrade” thing is a total sh*tshow. Why would upgrading on one library trash manual collections in other libraries and start unmatching content in different libraries. This almost feels like starting all over, not much of an upgrade if you ask anyone with some meticulous sorting and fixing.
Did anyone even test this before deciding to shove a popup over your main screen encouraging you to “upgrade”? Honest question, this feels like it went through limited testing and an alpha to me, and the responses in this thread seem to back that up.
Right now a lot of users are just gonna be left holding the bag and having to do a lot of work to rebuild years of work.
The appearance of choice to upgrade individual libraries is a smokescreen, you hit even one, this thing is gonna go through and have at your entire collection.
just look at this mess. I didn’t even touch this library. I have other libraries also untouched now with multiple unmatched content.
no - random stylised fan covers are not the best default choice for covers. The best cover is the original artwork, sick of changing these trashy looking covers that come up as defaults.
In short I made up a show - if you know Star Trek Deep Space Nine there is an underlying story arch that goes from season 3 to the end of 7 - there are 50 key episodes in this arch so I created a “maxi-series” of just those 50 episodes for some friends I was trying to get into the show - I call is “The Dominion War”. I do the same with The X-Files, where I made “I Want to Believe” and broke out only the alien conspiracy episodes. I’d hate to lose this
And as they are all “unmatched” I’m guessing that it’ll try to match them after the update - the question is will it ask me or just try to match it? Given it can’t match as the show doesn’t exist - well I just need to test.
Best way for that kind of story arcs or episode bundles are actually collections. You could still add the episodes as part of their regular shows while keeping one (or more) episode collections to reflect those stories/arcs.
I’ve done the same for the „Laughing Man“ and „Individual Eleven“ episodes of Ghost in the Shell (SAC).
I did notice earlier today that upgrading one Library triggered a metadata refresh in all libraries, even ones that were already using the new agents. That didn’t seem necessary, but I didn’t have any unmatched items, and it didn’t cause any problems for me.
Do you have a backup? I’m hoping that Plex folks are watching this, because it might be worth sharing your database with them.
just the scheduled one, watching the new agent march through my tv series now leaving a trail of destruction in it’s wake. I got a lot of work ahead it would appear.
After I did the upgrade, many TV shows did not show any longer and several of them showed but only had one episode (instead of over 100). When I changed the Agent back to “TheTVDB” things went back to the way they were before the Upgrade and all works again.
I don’t know if some shows did not work any longer because there are shows that I downloaded but did not rename. Before the upgrade Plex managed the Season and Episode fine. For example, “Barnaby Jones - Hostage.mp4” is what the file name is instead of Barnaby Jones S04E17.mp4
