The most basic of features - titles!

[armyofquad1]

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It’s quite simple - I went to a lot of trouble to name all my files, using the naming convention you lay out on your site. show - SxxExx - title.

I ripped a ton of Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVDs, which were not packaged in proper air order or by proper season and was a complete mess really, and went to the trouble to name them in the correct order based on wikipedia and air date.

However - it seems that plex has decided some database in some computer somewhere is more important than the file names that the operator that is running the software went to the time to enter in! Absolutely ridiculous! You have the episode title laid out with a location in your file naming convention - and yet you don’t program your software to utilize this, and instead override the end user with garbage data from who knows what?

I did research on this, found another thread that referenced an option to select fix incorrect match. Now, all my episodes show up with a date, instead of an episode title. Not what I wanted…I want my titles, that I went to the trouble to make sure were in all the file names, and is data I entered in for a reason, to be used! Is this really an unreasonable expectation?

So I read further - and I find this “Plex cannot take the episode name from the file name, only from embedded title tags.”

First - why in the hell not? You have this listed as an option in file naming - why wouldn’t you program this in? As I pointed out before, I find it extremely unacceptable that you’ve programmed plex to ignore the input of the operator, in favor of garbage data from internet land.

Second - I then next ran a tool to update the embedded title tags on all my episodes to include the episode names, and ran a refresh - no such luck! Still not reading episode names.

So…WHAT IN THE HECK DOES AN END USER HAVE TO DO TO GET THIS SOFTWARE TO ACTUALLY USE THE DATA INPUTTED FROM THE END USER INSTEAD OF GARBAGE INTERNET DATA???

[tom80H]

Like most software, Plex is not particularly good to read your mind or do one thing when you configure it to do something else (no offense).

The documentation you’re referring specifically states that the episode title (or any arbitrary text after the season/episode pattern of your episode file names) is being ignored
From https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/

Some important notes:

• Many of our naming instructions mention having Optional_Info at the end of the file name. As the label suggests, it’s optional, but many people like to use it for things such as an episode title; such optional info is ignored by Plex when matching content.

If you want to force Plex to use embedded metadata and ignore all online metadata from TheTVDb.com or TheMovieDatabase.org, you’ll need to set your library to use the Personal Media Show agent. Keep in mind this will only work for some media containers (e.g. mp4, m4v or mov).
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265256-naming-home-series-media/

To be perfectly open… your use case seems to be almost set to cause you trouble. While it’s perfectly possible to organize your shows as personal media, managing every aspect from metadata to artwork yourself it also means a huge amount of work.

Plex is made to take that overhead off your shoulders. To make that happen you’ll need to deal with it.
Sure you can cook your food on the Engine lid of your car… however there’s no guarantee it’ll keep working if you buy an eCar (or for what it’s worth a car with its engine in the back). Again… I’m not saying you cannot or should not do it… you’ll just need to adjust your expectations to the reality of what a software can or cannot do.

[armyofquad1]

It may be a huge amount of work to manage the metadata and artwork…but being that your automated system of doing so is completely broken and results in incorrect titles, that leaves me with little choice. It’s bad enough that it’s a lot of work to manage this, but then on top of it, I have to fight the half assed automatic system that doesn’t work right, to somehow override it, because it has ignored the data I input in the first place.

[armyofquad1]

Also, I looked at the options in the link you set to change it to personal media show, and it still isn’t working - still showing dates instead of titles now. They are mkv files, which is a pretty standard container. If you can’t have access to accurate databases, and you can’t use filename information, and you can’t use tags for very common file types - what can you do?

I simply want something that works correctly and accurately, and as it is, I loaded a bunch of files, and got incorrect titles on every episode, because you’re using some crappy database that listed everything in some other order other than the airdate order I found directly in wikipedia.

What is one supposed to do?

Because as this is, I find this to be completely problematic in so many ways, it’s not funny! This is only the tip of the problematic iceberg I’ve found in trying to use plex. Most infuriating of all - it seems anytime I want to relax and throw on something quickly late at night, it decides at that moment that it doesn’t like something, and doesn’t work at all, and I have to spend hours jumping through a bunch of hoops to reset things to get it to be happy again.

I do like the concept of an easy to use interface, the idea of automatically getting data from databases (if they were accurate), and tracking what is watched centrally…but functionally, this is garbage! Plain and simple! And I suppose I’m supposed to be alright with that because it’s free. Well, free or not, garbage is garbage. And price has little to do with it…I can’t find a good option out there that is designed intelligently and works properly for free or to pay for. I really don’t understand programmers…they seem to always want to tell the end user what they want, instead of listening to what the end user actually wants.

[tom80H]

Check out TheTVDb. Many shows have an alternate DVD or absolute order. You can tell Plex to use those instead (advanced option on a per-show level).
Wikipedia is not a good source when it comes to episode lists and orders.

MKV tagging is a mess… even dedicated apps like VLC will only deal with the most basic tags (=plain, flat, single layer). You’ll find a whole lot of threads where users tried dealing with it and gave up because it can have so many interpretations (what’s the meaning of a tag in a certain context)

Don’t get me wrong… picking your own personal order from a dvd box mixed up with information from Wikipedia because they’re all getting it wrong and then complaining that the online repository used by Plex isn’t getting your meaning implies you might be under some wrong expectations.

PS: Plex Ninja = Forum mod != Plex

[armyofquad1]

I didn’t pick a personal order. I picked production order per wikipedia. It seems this order is not an option for any of the databases that are used, as I consistently get wrong episode titles for any option.

I get that the results are only going to be as good as the data source one is relying on. Which in this case, is garbage! My main point here is that this is a major flaw in plex - the inability to reliably have selections titled properly! As my topic outlines - I would expect the ability to accurately title your content to be a rather basic feature. And that within plex, there has been no way offered to accurately title content, I’d say this is a pretty damn major flaw!

I’m simply asking for an update that will allow accurate titling. Do it by grabbing a tag. Do it by grabbing info from the file name. I don’t care…just give me a damn option to have titles that are correct!

I hardly think this is an unreasonable expectation to have an option for accurate titling, whether it be based on file name or tagging.

[Krazeh]

@armyofquad1

I picked production order per wikipedia. It seems this order is not an option for any of the databases that are used,

From an admittedly cursory check it appears the list on wikipedia is the same as the DVD order provided on TheTVDB. What agent are you using for matching? And have you told it to use DVD order rather than aired order?

[FordGuy61]

For TV Shows, Plex defaults to TheTVDB agent and uses episode ordering from TheTVDB.com.

For most shows, the TVDB provides three ordering options: Aired, DVD, and Absolute.

See Aqua Teen Hunger Force

After adding the show to Plex, you can tell it which order to use.

From the main show page, choose the pencil icon. This opens up the edit window. Choose Advanced, then the desired order, and save changes.

Then refresh the metadata for the show.

Plex should refresh the metadata and episode order automatically. If it does not, manually refresh the metadata for the show.

After the refresh completes, Plex should show the selected order.

[armyofquad1]

Setting it to DVD order appears to work. But I’m a bit confused as to why the site would categorize production order as DVD order, when it’s not the order they were on DVD. This is a rather unintuitive setting, given that I specifically labeled my rips in an order different from the order they are on the DVD. Which has me wondering…what does someone do that just ripped them straight from the DVD?

Also - while the titles are now correct, the preview slides are still incorrect.

I still would like an option to set titles by filename or tag, and I still identify the lack of this option as a major flaw in plex.