Sort Movies by Aspect Ratio (Trying to Identify Full Screen Movies)

General Discussions
1

Is there a way to sort the movies in your Plex library (or otherwise derive a list) by Aspect Ratio? I need an easy way to identify any of my movies that are full screen versions. This doesn’t seem to be an option in the “List View”. Maybe there’s a utility or configuration file somewhere where I can somewhat easily get that information (other than clicking each title, clicking “More” and clicking “Get Info”)?

Now that I have all of my movies online in Plex I want to slowly start to “upgrade” all of my older full screen versions to widescreen versions where they’re available. Any ideas would be appreciated! Thanks!

2

Well for anyone trying to do the same thing, I did figure out a way to get close to this by querying the Plex database directly. Here’s the process I used for anyone else looking to do the same thing:

  1. Save a backup copy of your Plex database. Open your Plex interface in a web browser, on the left navigate to SETTINGS | HELP and click the “Download Database” button. Call the file whatever you want but be sure to change the extension to “.DB”

  2. Open up your favorite SQLite application. I used DB Browser for SQLite available at: sqlitebrowser.org/.

  3. Execute the following SQL query (the “Execute SQL” tab in DB Browser for SQLite):

    SELECT metadata_items.title, media_items.display_aspect_ratio
    FROM media_items
    LEFT OUTER JOIN metadata_items
    ON media_items.metadata_item_id=metadata_items.id
    WHERE metadata_items.metadata_type=‘1’
    AND media_items.display_aspect_ratio LIKE ‘1.3%’
    ORDER BY metadata_items.title

In general the Plex agent seems to identify full screen movies with an aspect ratio of 1.33. It’s not always 100% correct from what I’ve seen but it at least gets you close.

Please feel free to let me know if there’s an easier way or something a little more authoritative. Thanks!

1 Like
3

To anyone else finding this: You need to replace the ’ in the code block, with '.

Correct version:

SELECT metadata_items.title, media_items.display_aspect_ratio
FROM media_items
LEFT OUTER JOIN metadata_items
ON media_items.metadata_item_id=metadata_items.id
WHERE metadata_items.metadata_type=‘1’
AND media_items.display_aspect_ratio LIKE ‘1.3%’
ORDER BY metadata_items.title