Start building the Plex database from a file (csv, or XML, ...)

General Discussions
1

Hi everyone,
I have already a pretty extensive database of movies for which I am using a pretty rudimentary but neat software (personal video database), with very efficient features.
I am looking at moving into Plex but I do not want to rebuild the whole database, especially the movie matches.
So, is there any way to provide in advance to Plex a file containing:

  • Movie Title
  • year
  • Imdb URL
  • Hard Drive Path

?

I could export an create an XML of CSV file from my current software that I would import into Plex.
This way, it will have no problem matching movies and files.

Obviously the ability to include more metadata (such as “watched” or “personal rating”) would be a major PLUS…

FYI my movies are organised in folder named exactly like the title of the movie.
I know that Plex wants the year in brackets in the folder name but I do not have that.

Thanks for your help.

2

Plex by default doesn’t care about your pre-downloaded metadata (most of them).
It works better if you let it do that itself.
Of course to download the right metadata, it must recognise which movie it is. Which can be trickier than most ppl think, because there are sometimes dozens of movies with a similar (or even identical) title.

So Plex depends on you helping it by providing at least a correct file name which includes the release year.
There is one thing your media manager can help with: let it write an XBMC/Kodi compatible .nfo file into the subfolder of every movie (you do use a subfolder per movie, do you?).
This little .nfo file is a XML document which should contain the IMDB ID of your movie. If this is present, it helps Plex a lot to identify and successfully ‘match’ the movie.

There is another thing, your media manager should be able to do to help: change the file and folder name of the movie to Plex’s requirements.
Alternatively, you can use other software like e.g. Filebot

You can also use the .nfo files directly for gathering metadata. You can install the .nfo importer agents which read all the other infos from the .nfo file and put them into Plex’s database.

3

Plex works on IMDB and TMDB to match movies. It’s been consistently good in the years I’ve used even with indie foreign movies. I see you’ve already taken a look at Plex naming system, if you’re worried about matches the only thing I can really recommend is to enforce better naming policy.

You can rename your library with FileBot, the software has integrated Plex Naming Schemes to make it even easier. If your folders/files are correctly named it should be fairly quick, and the software will ask you to designate the correct movie when it can’t decide (i.e. because of missing release date) so mismatch should be extremely minimal.

For watch status, my solution is to use Trakt as an intermediary. Look for scripts that can import your database on the website and then use the Plex Trakt Plugin to sync all watch status.

EDIT: Got beaten to the punch

4

Thank you both,
Yes, there are many movie names that are identical in my Database.
Renaming folders and files is not really an option yet but you suggested two things that might really do the trick for me:

  • Using .nfo files (yes all my movies are in individual folders)
  • Using trakt as a intermediary (great idea!)

Thanks a lot, I will investigate.

5

Just FYI, I generated .nfo files (they only contained year and imdb ID) in each movie folder and Plex clearly used them (I tested it by trying to trick Plex) for the matching.
Everything went very smoothly.