Should I "upgrade" my libraries?

[power]

my files are completely fine.

for example the only thing i have spotted that i could legitimately be a failing on my part was i had some extras filed away under a random extras folder with a movie, plex just found them and i dutifully put them in the folders they should be.

i’ll probably not know just how bad this is going to be until a few hours from now.

that popup and nagging up arrow paint this as a rosy thing - this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change to your library and essentially takes you offline for hours (I’m not even particularly big having 2100 movies and 6-700 tv shows).

[Volts]

That’s an interesting point; extras are discovered during the metadata refresh. That’s a little bit different between the old and newer agents. I don’t have very many extras in my main libraries.

I’m confused why so many of your items look like they’re brand new - they don’t have an old poster or a new poster.

If you sort By Date Added do the items still have the correct/original dates?

[power]

i don’t trust anything i’m seeing now as it looks like a lot of this is transient, this is as close as i’ve gotten to a full rebuild since setting this server up several years ago.

SOME WARNING WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE!

See reddit, people are reporting the same thing. Plex in this instance has not taken the time to acknowledge the amount of work server owners put into making their server theirs - my story and process here isn’t half as bad as a lot.

r/PleX - WARNING: Upgrading libraries to the new Plex agents will remove all...

r/PleX - Recommend NOT upgrading to new Plex agent

[Endicott_Summers]

Excellent point. With the old TVDB set up, I would often go to the website and I could see, “Ah, it has a different year from what I have put in the folder name” – maybe just a year earlier or later – because sometimes all databases do not agree on the exact year a TV show was released. So then I would change the year in the folder name and voila – problem solved. Now there’s no way to diagnose problems with matching – at least that I know of. Does anybody out there know a web site where we can check what Plex is now using to load the metadata? Thanks!

[Endicott_Summers]

Runaway! Runaway!

Seriously, don’t do it. Wait until things have stabilized.

I am so p.o.'d at Plex. With great excitement I setup a Plex server on a Synology NAS 3 months ago. Had I known all this would be going down, I would have just waited 6 months. Or maybe not done it at all.

My database has been completely corrupted three times so I have had to start completely over and lost all customizations three times – aaargh. When will I learn? I am now on the new agents and am dreading when Plex decides to “upgrade” us again.

Life lesson – I am simply not customizing anything, knowing that it will all be lost at some point. This is a huge let down because it takes away a core feature of using a media server.

Everyone should assume that their database will be trashed at some point in the future.

[power]

I think it’s stuck now, lots of spinning wheels. dashboard shows no activity, libraries do not indicate they are doing anything.

this is much worse than i thought it would be.

should be a fun weekend.

[russbgrant]

I’m holding off on my second movie library that has lots of 3rd party scanner matches. It’s large, 1400 titles and all have custom “Collection” tag I don’t want to lose and custom posters due to the old plex scanner being a bit crap with adult titles.

That said, the only other library that showed the upgrade option on was my TV library. I did it last night and it seems fine. shows with some oddball extras number as season episodes and what not all stayed the same, as did my collections and custom art for the collections that I updated in plex when I built the library in the first place. It ran a refresh from what I can tell, but it didn’t undo or upgrade my adult library that is the only one left with an upgrade option.

Do we know for sure that we don’t use the TVDB naming as a guide for specials and what not? It’s pretty crucial for TV libraries if you want the air dates to be correct. Surely these new scanners aren’t just pulling info blind in way no one can confirm they have it set up right?

Gonna give it some time before attempting to upgrade my last movie library. As much as I want to hit the button and see what happens, it might actually be easier to just rebuild it from scratch if it’s really this much of a gong show.

[stottm]

I ran into a world of pain when I agreed to let Plex upgrade the libraries and refresh the metadata. PMS started crashing, I saw references to sqlite being busy and the container in which Plex runs was super slow. Lesson learned, make sure you allocate additional storage for PMS when running the library upgrade and metadata refresh.

I run Plex on a lightweight Linux server container. It had 50GB allocated to Linux root / volume. Which was fine, the media is on another volume. I had 20GB free space. Well it ran out of free space having only 13MB free and it crashed the PMS and the Linux container was very slow to respond. Once I realized the / volume of the container was full, I increased it to 200GB from the 50GB and instantly everything went super fast. It finished refreshing the metadata and things are working now. The / volume peaked at 91GB used. After cleaning bundles and emptying the Plex trash it dropped down to 81GB . I’ll let the scheduled tasks run and see where I am at in the morning.

You might think this is unusual but keeping your containers fairly constrained means you don’t waste resources like free space that could be used by other containers. If you run PMS on a container, docker, Kubernetes, LXD, etc. be advised that this Plex Library Upgrade / Metadata Refresh will consume considerable storage.

[thesoreloser]

I recently updated, some posters were changed to some weird ones, but I did a rematch and it’s back to normal.

Also, a lot of shows/movies that weren’t picked up by the scanner previously seems to have been matched for the first time (they appeared under new), so that’s great.

[Craigyy92]

This sounds like a real sh*tshow… I’m gonna hold off and hope it’s not forced on me.

[power]

ok, I’m back!

everything was stalled so I decided to give the server a kick and when it came back up heaps of stuff was straight up missing metadata.

So TV shows, I manually updated each show (then customised the posters to non-garbage ones).

On movies, I just told it to refersh the entire thing, it appears to have added metadata for everything. However, lots of crappy posters which I’ll need to update.

Lastly Collections are all still boned this will probably take longer for me to re-create.

If I haven’t made it clear, Plex often chooses a completely terrible poster that needs to be changed. Why can’t we just have these rubbish fan looking posters as alternates?

So yeah, SEVERAL hours to get it all back up.

Server for anyone wondering is Windows. plenty of disk space, RAM, processing power.

We will be forced onto this, I’m glad i’ve gotten it done, even though i didn’t really want to.

[max_plexibility]

OK, how to skip this “upgrade” forever? any advice?

I am completely fine with the old (slow) metadata agent. I want to keep it that way and not rematch anything the next days and weeks on my collection.

I really need to skip this. would be great to get some advice.

I already have a complete Plex - folder backup including registry (just in case).

[lishan89uc]

DO NOT upgrade if you have anime!!! 5+ years of work gone! in an instant. how do we get rid of that up arrow?

“said out of rage and is deleted”

A more civil and productive response below.

[pmostoff]

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who had problems with this. I thought I was going crazy. My biggest issue is that even when marking the option to “Prefer local metadata” it seems to completely ignore it. This is really important for my setup. For any series of movies, I’ve manually edited the embedded metadata to say “Movie Series 01,” etc. so that the actual titles of the film don’t dictate the order their in, rather the actual watch order will place them in the right place.

For instance, say you have the Harry Potter series in your library and you “upgrade” to this new scanning agent. All of the movies are then out of order because it only cares about sorting them alphabetically. Even if you add a “Sort Name” to the metadata, that gets ignored. This is really my only full-stop issue with this change.

I’ve gone ahead and redone my library to use the old agent again but find it very annoying that now I have a big yellow icon asking me to upgrade to something that will break all of my sorting. I know that you can still change the sort title in Plex itself but that’s not what I want. I specifically add sort title’s to the files themselves to avoid this happening. Really hope they can fix this, I usually love using Plex but this will kind of ruin the experience for me and I definitely do not want to have to go through and redo the metadata for my entire library through Plex’s interface. That just shouldn’t be necessary.

Also, I’m sure the team is probably relatively small but I’m pretty disappointed to see on the contact page that it says “Support questions submitted through the contact form will go unanswered.” There needs to be a way to make sure that the technical team is aware of issues like this.

[Volts]

@pmostoff

Even if you add a “Sort Name” to the metadata, that gets ignored.

I use “Sort Title” in Plex for my Harry Potter movies. Plex automatically uses “Sort Title” for articles.

Can you share screenshots or examples of what is being ignored?

Are you hoping that will be extracted from file Metadata? Was it previously?

@pmostoff

“Prefer local metadata” it seems to completely ignore it.

What type are your files - MP4? MKV? How is the Title embedded?

I don’t think it’s a good idea to use “fake” names for this purpose, but extracting Title seems to work for many people.

[suskis]

I have over 5000 movies, so it’s taking a lot of time. However I have already noticed, to my horror, that those movies that I have in different version and that Plex used to put together as duplicates (and I manually separated and labelled correctly) are now duplicates again. This will take me days to fix. IN SHORT: DO NOT ACCEPT!!!

[pmostoff]

@Volts

What type are your files - MP4? MKV? How is the Title embedded?

All of my files are in MP4 format, simple out of personal preference. This has never been an issue before so I don’t see why it would be now. I use a tool called Subler on my Mac to edit the embedded metadata for files. For example, here’s the very simple data I manually put in for the first Harry Potter film:

Under the “old” Plex scanner, this works perfectly. Since I have the Name and Sort Name manually added as metadata, Plex will use those but pull in the other information like film description, release date, etc. You can see this working by looking at the data that you see when you edit an item in the web interface. It’s automatically pulling in the embedded ‘Sort Name.’

When switching to the new agent, that metadata seems to just be ignored. When checking the same edit screen in the Plex interface, it’s simply setting the Sort Title to the data it’s pulling in from the web, so usually the same as the Title, excluding articles like “The” at the beginning.

@Volts

Are you hoping that will be extracted from file Metadata? Was it previously?

So yes, essentially I am hoping it would extract and use the file’s metadata because it has been and still does do that using the old agent. I don’t understand why it doesn’t seem to work with the new one, especially since there is an option to “Prefer local metadata” under the advanced section for a library when you use the new one.

@Volts

I don’t think it’s a good idea to use “fake” names for this purpose, but extracting Title seems to work for many people.

I’m not sure what you mean by “using ‘fake’ names” to be honest. I’m just explicitly stating what the name of the movie should be read as and then explicitly stating what it should be sorted as. I hope the screenshots provide a better understanding of what I meant. Again, it’s just always worked and never been a problem in the past so I don’t know why it is now. Seems like it should still work.

Another example of where I use this extensively: I have a collection of the James Bond films in my library. In the library, I prefer them to be sorted as James Bond 01, etc. rather than “Dr. No” and the like, because I want them to all be together in one place and easy to find. So, they show up under J for James Bond that way, and in the order they were released. That info is simply stored as embedded metadata in the MP4 files. Again, I understand that might seem strange to some people but it’s the way I like to organize things and it has worked up until now. I tried switching to the new agent and all breaks when I use it.

[Volts]

I thought you were describing something different - embedding the Sort Title in place of the Title. I understand now.

@pmostoff

It’s automatically pulling in the embedded ‘Sort Name.’

Woah. I didn’t think Plex ever pulled a Sort Name (or Title) from file metadata.

Ok, I’ve learned something new.

I know it will pull Name/Title from Metadata. I’m curious and will see if Sort behaves the same for me.

[solitaryreign]

Well nice, I just upgraded one small library with metadata refresh enabled. And PLEX decides to refresh metadata on a completely different library (which already used the new agent) where I didn’t want it to. What a shitshow!

[Scott-M]

Yup, I tried to do just a single library yesterday, and it started refreshing metadata in ALL libraries.

I ended up stopping the Plex server and restarting. Fortunately that stopped the process and did not break anything (that I can tell) but do so at your own risk.

Definitely a bug.