Server Version#: 1.17.0.1841 running on DSM 6.2.2-24922 Update 3 (Synology DS416Play)
Player Version#: Windows 10 Client 1.3.1.916, and also Web Client 3.108.2 (in Chrome)
Both of the above clients seems to exhibit this behavior (as it’s probably a server issue):
If I open a show and from the list of episodes, select the … menu on an episode and select “Refresh Metadata”, the circles spin and… nothing happens. The show still shows as Episode 1, Episode 1. What I’m expecting is the episode Title to be pulled from the Title metadata in the file itself. (Yes, I added the Title to the file after it was added to the Library). Sometimes (haven’t been able to repro 100%), the episode Title will be set to the modified date of the file.
Oddly, however, if I back out to the library view itself and use the … menu on the Show and select Refresh Metadata, it works! All the episodes in the show will pull the Title from the .mp4 file.
I assume it should work if I ask a specific Episode to refresh metadata, therefore I’m posting this as bug. (I didn’t see a forum or help area to post bugs but I’m new so please let me know if this is the wrong place).
More details: The video files I’m talking about here are .mp4 (and some .mkv) files that we’ll call Home Videos (they are not movies or TV Shows in the databases - for inquiring minds, they are lectures from The Great Courses DVDs) - therefore my Agent for this entire Library is set to Personal Media Shows (at the Library level).
To repro, set up a library as described and create a TV Show with only a Season 01. Add some episode video files that do not have a Title in the file metadata. Once that is imported into Plex, manually edit the Title tag using Windows explorer and then try to refresh the episode metadata as described above. It won’t work. Back out to the Show level and Refresh Metadata for the whole show and you’ll see each episode will update properly.
When you modify a media file (metadata, add/delete tracks, etc) after adding it to Plex, you need to perform the Plex Dance. It clears out the old information then re-scans the file for the new information.
while i understand the Dance is it not possible to just override the cache on the item when we click refresh. there by doing the dance without moving the files. i am sure some coding can be done to say Purge the library cache of this item then rescan it. after all these years We should not be needing to do the polka.
Taken from the dance you linked: with suggestions Why not have a way to purge the items in question from the library without having to move the files…
This seems possible to purge said cached metadata without moving The purpose of this is to remove all cached metadata and xml data for an item that Plex usually keeps. This helps when you want to “start from scratch” for particular item
** move all files for the media item out of the directory your Library is looking at, so Plex will not “see” it anymore
**scan the library library (to detect changes)
**empty trash
**clean bundles
**double check naming schema and move files back
scan the library could be done differently to reach the same goal
We’ve asked Engineering to provide a “Flush Known Metadata” for an item (aka. RESET / “Scan again as if new”) feature.
To date, they have not provided it because of the “Dance” workaround.
In their defense, Properly curated media, presented the first time, won’t mismatch and need “dancing”.
FWIW, I have 28,929 files indexed and not one of them has ever mismatched
A defacto “Must Have” tool for media is one like FileBot. It gets it done right painlessly because it does the validating, internet lookup, and even structure creation for you.
so if i understand you correctly it can be done but won’t because we can do the work around which would not need done if we had this Flush Know Metadata tool…
Second the blame goes to its naming before it is scanned into the system by plex which is the same as saying we’re not gonna give you the perfect fix.
so you learn its naming but in some cases i have found even with using filebot to fix the naming before loading into my library i still needed to manual fix the file this is most likely the case for tv series that are later released as movies. such as the sci release of Dune which was a tv series then a movie so that is a one off that even if named correctly the agent could confuse it. there was also earthsea which can do this as well. admittedly where it happens the most are with non-english releases of Anime where it can take time for tvdb or other places to settle on an american name. and with the death of plugins i have to either wait until it is finally on TVDB or stick to some workaround hodge podge.
in short how about simply doing away with the work around and officially getting this Tool…
I appreciate the responses and I understand that the Plex Dance will refresh everything properly (well, for .mp4 files at least).
However, the issue (which I’ve tested extensively) is reproducible and may be better put this way:
If I add a Title to a file already in the library and then try to pick up that Title by refreshing the metadata on the episode itself, it fails to do so. However, refreshing metadata on the show that contains the episode DOES WORK - no plex dance or rescan of the library is required.
So, if refreshing metadata on a show works and this internally loops through the episodes and refreshes metadata on each of them, why does it not work if the user tries to refresh just one episode? It doesn’t seem to be by design and if it’s too much to get it working then I suggest removing the option at the episode level. It’s not a big deal to go to the show and refresh it all…
Big picture: this is not a big deal and something I would not prioritize anywhere near the top of what I imagine is a long list of projects – but nice to have on the list next time someone is in that code…
No, the filename is accurate but plex local media does not grab a title from the filename. Remember, these are not actually tv shows. No internet lookup of anything.
Since my encoder wasnt putting titles in the file itself, i ran into this. I wrote a program to parse the title from the filename and save it in the Title field of the .mp4 itself so no problems with new files. Just had a lot that i fixed after they were added
to the library… and i learned that plex will not pull the title from my filename.
If you are using the TVDB, then the episode Title will be grabbed from the DB using the SxxExx info in the filename. However, I am not using that at all as these files are not actual TV Series, they are ‘home movies’ as far as Plex is concerned.
I have not tried creating a Library of type ‘Other Videos’ as you have mentioned. If you are saying I should be doing that instead, please let me know. Thanks again for your replies.
BTW, I do want to note (for others stumbling on this post) that I’m aware of the custom Scanner and Agent that someone wrote (can’t recall where I ran into it but web search will find it) that does pull an episode Title from the filename itself. However, I have not installed any custom agents or scanners and am running the ‘vanilla’ Plex server for Synology. I want to see what I can accomplish with it before I write (or use) any custom extensions.
Thanks. I’ll set up an Other Videos library to play around but I’m worried I might lose the ability to group lectures properly (which I suspect is why the article I referenced recommends you set up a TV Shows library for such videos).
I’ll post back after I play around a bit with the Other Videos type. Thanks.
Ok, so I played around with the “Other Videos” library type and here are my thoughts (for those finding this post, I’m guessing Trumpy81 already knows all of this).
I have decided to stick with “TV Show” type libraries for my educational series (courses of lectures) because:
While the Web UI and the Windows UI both have a nice “list view” of the contents which does make it easy to find things quickly and efficiently (see pic), this UI is not available on FireTV Stick or Samsung TVs - so on those devices, it is harder to see the Titles.
If a file has a Title embedded in its metadata, it will be used instead of the filename. While this sounds good, it’s not so good for lectures or episodes that you want in order. The Title metadata in a file does not typically contain the episode number (which the filename does), so once the Title is used by Plex, the episodes get sorted alphabetically and are no longer presented in order. In the example pic here, I removed the Title metadata from episode 17 so its filename is being used (which lets you see it is episode 17). The other media filenames also begin with the episode number, but the Title embedded in those files does not – and you can see that overrides the filename (again, normally a good thing and one could certainly put the episode number in the Title metadata but that’s not typical - maybe there is another metadata item for episode number but it’s not clear what Plex would be using for that).
There is a bug in the UI (Web/Windows at least) whereby after you have selected a folder in your library, any navigation back to the library selects the first folder in the library, not the library itself. Example: Select a folder in your library. Now navigate back to the library’s top level (showing all folders in the library). Now navigate back to Home or another of your Plex libraries. Finally, select this Library again - you would expect to be take to the Library’s top level but you will be taken inside of the first folder in the library. Just a small annoyance but worth mentioning.
There is currently no way to set a poster image for a folder in a Other Videos library in Plex. You can set a poster for a TV Show folder in Plex (which is also just a folder, typically containing subfolders for the seasons) but not for a folder in an Other Videos library. This is not a functional problem, but it does make the appearance of these libraries less sexy than the TV Show counterpart.
Finally, nothing to do with Plex but for those using Emby and Plex together, the Plex plugin for Emby does not contain the nice “List” view for these libraries - same issue as mentioned in #1. So, on my big screen devices, the UI for browsing episodes (lectures) is just not as nice as the TV Show UI (which has it’s own issues but they are less problematic overall, IMO).
