It should be possible to export the metadata from the database to a more reliable and manually handable way.
I using plex quite for a long time and the main Idea behind this request is, that I managed to crash or lose my plex database a couple of times (plex server updates, os x upgrade/reinstallation, separate system account for server programs, and there are even more ways where this could become worse, e.g. switching the os, ... )
All my movies are on external hard drives and they are not effected form all these problems. By scanning these folders, a lot of movies are wrongly detected or not at all. Although I used the given naming conventions for the movie folders/files. (most movies are german and some of them are simply not listed on the pages the given scrapers).
So I've a lot of work to checking all movies manually. What I'm asking for is a way to store this 'work' along with the movies, so that I have it only to do once, no matter what happens with my pms or os installation.
== EDIT ==
At least on OS X , media files has the capability to have o ton of metadata informations, but not sure how they are visible to other os.
It would be great if the server could fill this metadata.
I would not want plex to touch my master media files and I am very happy that I can manage my media files myself and plex has its own extra meta data separately. In fact for me, the plex user only has read-access to my media repositories. So myself I would be against such request but I would have no objection for plex inc to offer tools to help me manage my media files in a way that keeps them in perfect shape for any media player application and at the same time optimised for plex - adopting and collaborating with third parties with feature rich editing products such as mp3tag but going beyond that into all other media types.
Plex team has said a few times they won't go changing source files. However, adding an NFO file is not changing the source file....
On the Other Hand, what you can do as a work around for now is install and load up your collection in XBMC and export the library. This will create the NFO and additional metadata.
Yes I know there are a couple of work arounds for this problem. The most obvious one is simply to not use plex.
The reason why I'm using and supporting plex is that they are brilliant in building interfaces and all other media managers are way behind in usability and design. I was really disappointed when they announced to stop development of the mac-native media manager. But suprisingly I really like the web interface they came up with. (I normally totally prefer native programs, the most useful one in my opinion is mediaelch , but still not close to plex) But thats not the point.
What most software does not care about these days, is to consider fall back solutions and proper backups, so plex too.
I think it just enhances the user experience a lot, if you don't have to care about your manually edited informations and fixed matches. They should be stored in a way, that is clear where they are belonging to and they should be easily backup- and restorable with common backup solutions. (e.g. rsync, time machine..)
I just asked for info/metadata files aligned with the media files itself, since i think it is the easiest way to establish this and is also solves issues with e.g. copying movies to other places/drives. If they find an other/better way thats fine too.
@sa2000 this is not meant to be the standard way of how plex should manage the informations, its just meant to be optional fallback to improve database scanning and reduce work on fixing wrong matches.
