Thank you! I had only done TV libraries to this point and that setting is not available in the advanced settings of an upgraded TV library. I will set it accordingly when I do my Movie libraries. Thank you again!!
It will at least at some point not be possible anymore to add new items to such a library.
Simply because these agents won’t be there anymore.
And new and old agents cannot coexist in the same library, either.
The old agents are already no longer getting updated. Any bugs will only be fixed in the new agents.
Thank you. In your estimation, will there be a robust and detailed procedure for someone in my situation after all the dust settles? I just want to have time to prepare my database and work out a contingency plan in case things don’t go well. I’m very protective of my ■■■■-retentive databases 
If you relied on workarounds (“Split items”) to achieve a behaviour which is not supported in Plex (e.g. different versions/cuts of movies) then there will be no procedure to preserve these workarounds.
If you in the past rather used the “Fix Match” command, instead of implementing a conforming folder/file naming schema, you will have a lot of work ahead of you.
But if your file and folder structure is already in a good shape, there will be relatively few issues.
As already recommended further up, try creating a new library with the new agent and point it to your existing files. Let it scan and match until thing settle down.
Then look at the outcome.
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Thank you. I will experiment with that. I purchased a copy of Filebot, which takes care of most of my naming for me. I use “movie name (year) - resolution audio format” as my naming scheme for movies so hopefully I won’t run into too many issues. All television show are in “television” directories on various drives and have the show name as the root folder, followed by “Season X.” Each season has “series name - SxEx - resolution audio format”. I’ve had to use the “fix match” on a few items, but as a percentage, it would be very low.
I strongly recommend you to change that to
“movie name (year) - [resolution audio format]”
That’s it. I forgot the brackets.
I jumped on the conversion when it popped up. Got the “Failed!” message immediately. It seemed to start though. It ended up taking hours and hours, and refreshing just one movie could take half an hour. Seemed like it just went slower and slower until it just stalled. I had to shut down the server and start it back up after a while. Nothing seems lost to me. I’ve gone through all libraries and checked if they’re using the right agent, and refreshed them manually. All seems ok. Locked fields are untouched, and the few split movies I’ve checked, has not merged.
A few covers has been changed, but nothing major. I hope it’s all as it should be. I don’t know. At least it’s working fine. I didn’t have many custom changes, though.
Two things are bothering me a bit though. How can I know for sure that’s everything is converted and up to date?
And now I can’t get rid of that UP arrow on the activity/dashboard icon up on the right. It’s there all the time now, even though there’s no activity.
Absolutely not is my advice. The new meta data ‘upgrade’ is total trash. Seems to have deleted my artwork and split all of my programs. I had to cancel by stopping the program. Does anyone know how I downgrade and stay from from this basket case upgrade forever?
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so following this tutorial, it will not touch existing metadata at all?
looks like the “Metadata Refresh of the whole library” is mandatory, isn’t it?
Yes. Without it, the conversion is incomplete and you can get all sorts of weird behavior when you subsequently add different versions of existing movies or move the files to a different hard drive etc.
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Do you mean the old trick of forcing different agents?
I ask because the recommendation to Split different cuts is still present in the support docs.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200381043-multi-version-movies/
- Note : This feature is not intended for situations where you might have, for instance, both a “theatrical” and “director’s cut” version of a movie. Likewise, it is not appropriate for 2D vs 3D versions. Those situations are best handled by Splitting the movie into separate library items.
Yes the different agents trick is no longer possible, because there are no different agents anymore.
The linked article doesn’t mention splitting.
Split version of a movie are now back put together (extremely annoying) but real problem is that anime series have now different artwork used and almost every time is japanese one (I manually changed them to italian and now I am so disappointed).
I think Plex should use time and resources to add useful and requested things (like being able to manually change the language of a movie for the thousands of files that have no language specified) instead of doing stunts like this one!!!
The linked article does mention splitting for me too. Blue box at the bottom says exactl what Volts has quoted. Are you saying there is not workaround for theatrical and directors/extended cuts?
There is no recommendation to split items. The article is about merging items.
Only at the bottom is a link to an article about splitting. This cannot be construed as a recommendation.
The fact the article is saying that is how they are ‘best handled’ is a recommendation. How are they best handled now?
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Still the same. It’s just that if you have previously splitted the movie, it might have to be splitted again after the agent upgrade.
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On the positive side, the new agent seems to have its advantages, as a start it seems to be faster. And I understand the need of the new agent. The problem is Plex did not provide a migration tool, if the media was already matched instead of writing a migration/upgrade script they just relied in re-matching everything with the new agent which is dealing to the chaos we have now. Very lazy of Plex taking this giant step without a data migration path.
And people keep saying that the problem is because of not following the naming convention. Sorry, but that’s not fair, I follow the naming convention and still had lots of problems during the upgrade. Some users report that they had no issues and mention the naming convention, well, maybe they only watch material that is easily matched, but it is not the same for everything, for example, media in “foreign” languages is problematic to match, specially Anime. Something that might help is to put the IMDB/TMDB tag in the file/folder name, but this is horrible, first this would be Plex specific and second you are marrying the naming convention to a provider, and for example all this chaos is because we are losing thetvdb. But since a couple of years I gave up and accepted to use imdb tags for media that was problematic to match. And I hate it.
What do you mean by that? Plex is even using TMDB as its primary source in the new agents.
