I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while. How does Plex determine the date/year of a video? I have several libraries that aren’t Movies or TV shows. They run the gamut from vacation videos, drone footage, random GoPro type stuff and some… uh, adult content.
When I’m browsing using the “discover” view, there’s almost always a line of videos labeled “Videos from the 1970s” and occasionally even 1960s. But I really don’t have any video files in personal media libraries from those decades. Some of them even have dates that I have manually entered in the Plex’s “Originally Available” date field. I’ve checked a bunch of files from ones that don’t and there’s no metadata in them indicating dates in the 60s or 70s. The creation and modification dates for the files themselves don’t either. I find it funny that even when I input a date into Plex, it still wants to think that the video is from a completely different decade.
@Plan-B said:
I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while. How does Plex determine the date/year of a video? I have several libraries that aren’t Movies or TV shows. They run the gamut from vacation videos, drone footage, random GoPro type stuff and some… uh, adult content.
When I’m browsing using the “discover” view, there’s almost always a line of videos labeled “Videos from the 1970s” and occasionally even 1960s. But I really don’t have any video files in personal media libraries from those decades. Some of them even have dates that I have manually entered in the Plex’s “Originally Available” date field. I’ve checked a bunch of files from ones that don’t and there’s no metadata in them indicating dates in the 60s or 70s. The creation and modification dates for the files themselves don’t either. I find it funny that even when I input a date into Plex, it still wants to think that the video is from a completely different decade.
In PMS/agents have you got Local Media assets enabled? In the Library Other videos / advanced settings
when following @SE56’s approach, it’ll help if the files are e.g. in mp4/m4v containers and have embedded metadata (at least for the release date). for better transparency you might create multiple libraries of that type (e.g. 1 for each home videos, drone videos and uh… other stuff)
Yup, all my personal video libraries use the Personal Media agent. The vast, vast majority of content are MP4 files, though few of them have the date embedded in the metadata. That seems like an odd way to go about assigning the year given that Plex has its own internal availability date. But I’ll go tag a few files that show up in the 1970s category to see if they move.
well… you can also do it in Plex Web.
downside… if anything happens to your library and you don’t have a recent backup, those manual edits are lost and you need to enter things again. if you put the dates (or simply years) into the video’s metadata, it’s there for good.
I actually do a lot of edits in Plex Web. All the posters, backgrounds, custom synopses, etc, that are in my Movies and TV Shows libraries are done there. So if there was a catastrophic loss of data, they’d all be wiped out too.
It’s not a huge deal for all the personal media to have wrong dates. It’s just a little odd (and a bit annoying) to see them miscategorized even though Plex has it’s own date stamp stored.
I also just edited the metadata for a few random files showing up as 1970s videos. Then I tried refreshing the metadata in PW and also using the Analyze option. But they still show up as from the 1970s.
@Plan-B said:
I actually do a lot of edits in Plex Web. All the posters, backgrounds, custom synopses, etc, that are in my Movies and TV Shows libraries are done there. So if there was a catastrophic loss of data, they’d all be wiped out too.
It’s not a huge deal for all the personal media to have wrong dates. It’s just a little odd (and a bit annoying) to see them miscategorized even though Plex has it’s own date stamp stored.
I also just edited the metadata for a few random files showing up as 1970s videos. Then I tried refreshing the metadata in PW and also using the Analyze option. But they still show up as from the 1970s.
A question, are you adding Metadata to the files via PLEX or a third party app?
I would be trying MetaZ Beta 38 if using Sierra or High Sierra. Add Metadata to the mp4 file that will be permanent when PLEX scans.
I was just using VLC to edit the meta tags. It doesn’t save properly for some file formats, but definitely does for MP4s. I’ve tried adding dates to the Date field in a few different formats (YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY, and DD-MM-YY) but none of them cause Plex to properly categorize the video. It sure would be nice if Plex just recognized its own date entry in its own XML.
