It’s next to impossible to search or research this topic based on it specifically being about “The” and “A” but I have tried looking. I have a huge amount of Movies, and I just noticed when migrating to a new NAS, the exact amount of Movies in Plex doesn’t equal what’s on my physical drive. It’s off by exactly 6. OK… So I figure I’ll go through and A/B the file list in Windows Explorer and compare to the file list in Plex (huge waste of time, but OK).
It took maybe half a dozen movies before I had to scroll WAYYYYYY down to files starting with “The” and once I found it scrolled all the way back up to resume. This immediately became obviously far too tedious to do… So what made more sense was to ask what I’m up against here.
Is there any option in Plex to display exactly verbose from file name? Or is this being forced from the Metadata synching and not Plex? Should I use what is showing up in Plex to rename files (like “Avengers, The” instead of “The Avengers”) but then the question also arises, if this is pulling from metadata, what would the effect of doing that end up being?
I see this also in my music in more varied ways (including the above), sometimes an artist appears by last name, first name. Sometimes their full name is considered a band name so it displays exactly as is.
Any help related to this would be really appreciated to know what’s going on and what direction I need to look to resolve this.
I know there is a way to define/edit what plex ignores see Advanced, Hidden Server Settings | Plex Support but the first thing I would do for trying to fix matches is to check for duplicates. If plex doesnt correctly match something 100% it can sometimes combine movies.
If you are looking to get down and do a full 1:1 file comparison, I think writing something that uses the plex API would fit you better. (Thats what I use)
You say “off by 6,” but which way? Referring to this screenshot, keep in mind that the ‘21’ does not refer to the number of movies in the library, but to the number of tiles being displayed. This can vary due to collections, and the setting you chose for displaying them.
For instance, if 5 movies were added to a collection, and the library is configured to “Hide items which are in collections,” Plex will show one tile for the collection, but not for the individual movies, so the tile count will be reduced by 4. If the library is set to “Show collections and their items,” there will be 6 tiles (one for the collection, plus one for each of the 5 movies).
The display of collections only applies when the library is sorted by Title, so you can switch to sorting by, say, Release Date, and the tile count should be closer to the actual number of movies in the library.
I found this which looks to be part of the culprit:
ArticleStrings - A comma-separated list of words considered to be grammatical articles, which are removed in sort titles. the, das, der, a, an, el, la
So the big question, is if they are removed from the sort titles, would editing the hidden setting cause Plex to put them back? That would have to require a scan of the entire library I’d assume? Would sure be a better option if it was exposed in the Admin as a check box on/off and off as the default with simple language explaining it, giving an option.
That sort of explains the Music situation, but I am still curious about the other sorting methods where it defines a persons name vs band name, especially if I tell it to use local metadata over internet and it seems like my preferences are being overridden.
I specifically turned off collections as soon as they implemented them, so it’s not related to that. And by 6, I mean it’s off by 6 in a range of exactly 1544 movies. My hard drive has exactly 1550 MP4, MKV and AVI files. I actually stumbled upon two M4V files and three MPG files when I sorted by type my eye missed at first scan, but I checked and those are showing up in plex.
So mayyyybe there are 6 movies with duplicate names and I will see if that might explain it.
You would have to do a metadata refresh for the entire library for the sort title’s to update I am pretty sure. I don’t believe scanning the library would update it as it’s the metadata (specifically the sort title field that is changed).
This is just a guess on my part, but I would think the reason they don’t expose this option in the settings page is because excluding grammatical articles is the accepted/normal way of handling sorting and the majority of people are use to that. This is how libraries work, stores (record, movies) and most other things. Based on that, I’m thinking they figure that for the people that want to change this behavior, they will at least give them the option in a hidden/advanced settings file. Also, Emby and Jellyfin do the same thing, meaning they exclude grammatical articles from the sort title and also don’t expose that in the settings.
Anyway, to help with your current situation, I would suggest installing WebTools-NG on your laptop (doesn’t need to be the same machine as where PMS is installed) and use the export feature from that.
You can read more about it and download it from here: GitHub - WebTools-NG/WebTools-NG: WebTools Next Generation for Plex. I believe it is was created by either a Plex employee or ninja or some with some affiliation to Plex (and possibly another person helping out).
You should be able to export all your movies using that with the Title field (that will have the grammatical articles in their spot as the movie’s title appears on posters). Then you can go through your movies from Plex and compare that to what you have in Windows Explorer and determine if anything is missing.
[Note, I see that @dane22 also mentioned WebTools-NG and I believe they were involved in the development of it. I’m still keeping my link though ]
After editing the hidden setting, simply refresh metadata on the affected movies/albums/artists. Plex will re-populate the Sort field accordingly, assuming the field isn’t locked.
I wouldn’t object to the setting being added to the UI, but defaulting it to ‘off’ would not be appropriate. Ignoring articles for alphabetizing purposes has been standard practice in several languages since pretty much always.
The sort order issue I totally get, I only argue for an option in the admin, sort of like collections, and the ability to toggle it if I want.
However, all your kind help is appreciated. 4 of the files ended up being second discs (Trailers and behind the scenes content). I named them almost exactly like the main movies movie title (year).ext but made the mistake of adding Bonus Disc after the title and before the year. I discovered the following syntax I am trying to use now: -behindthescenes Apparently you don’t add the year to the file name? I got this info from this link: Plex Movie Naming Conventions (plexopedia.com)
And the last 2 of them were a total exception for me as I avoid multi-disc movies, except The Watchman Ultimate Collection which is really 3 physical discs, but Plex was counting the 3 as 1.
(Working as intended).
So mystery solved. Thank you all again for the support!
Definitely check out WebTools-NG though if you want to make the change to Article Strings so you can do it in a safe way (and you can modify other hidden/advanced settings).
[Slight hijack] @dane22 can you add it so that you can change the number of log files from WebTools-NG? I didn’t see that when I looked through all the settings. [/hijack]
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