I searched and didn’t see anything close to this in Feature Requests yet.
I’d like to see the option to have external, text-based metadata for movies and shows.
I, for one, don’t like editing metadata directly inside Plex, because if something happens to your plex database, you lose all those changes. I prefer to keep that sort of stuff with the movie, especially if I give that movie file to another person. Unfortunately, Plex only pulls in metadata stored inside the video file if the file is an MP4. If it’s an MKV, AVI, etc then you’re out of luck. Files can be remuxxed, but then there’s trade off’s because MP4’s have their own limitations (like the fact that Plex won’t recognize the forced subtitle flag in an MP4, or that MP4’s won’t work with .sup subtitles that come from blurays).
What I’d like to see is the ability to drop a text file alongside a movie, and just call the file: [Movie_Filename].Metadata.txt — Then, the file could contain all the same fields that Plex already reads from MP4’s (Name, Description, Release Date, Cast, Genre, etc.). Plex is already setup to scan for files saved alongside media (like poster art, video extras, etc), so I can’t imagine it’d take that much more to code for this.
This would be great for TV metadata at the Show and Season levels, as well. Especially since the new Plex Series Scanner now supports descriptions and titles at the Season level. Right now, if we want to change the metadata at the show or season level, we’ve got no choice but to do it inside of Plex itself.
Plus, the next time my computer’s internal hard drive dies on me, or I move to a new computer and don’t want the hassle of migrating my old library (or have issues with migrating due to an OS change), I’d like to be able to just drop my entire library into Plex and have everything immediately look the way I want across the board, in terms of metadata.
