For example if I have “Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1958).m4v” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).m4v”–each in a subfolder with the same name (without the .m4v of course).
Typically both movies that follow this pattern will match as the earlier movie. If I try to “fix match” it doesn’t work. Specially I mean I choose fix match, choose the right movie, and then nothing actually changes.
Even more frustratingly, every so often both movies will combine into one listing for the earlier movie–meaning I have to then split apart the new listing, and after the listing is split, guess what, I have two instances of the one movie once again.
Can someone please explain to me why even following the guidelines for naming movies does not work to get Plex to correctly distinguish between similarly-named movies and in general how to fix incorrect matches in a way that actually works?
With fix match you have a selection of “auto” or “Search” to Fix, depending on your Advanced Library setting which is default in “Search”. Try Plex Movie or the The movie Database
(Red is where it is now - Green is where it needs to be - do NOT disable LMA - ur gonna need it, just not where it is)
Plex is reacting to embedded and bogus info in the Title Field of your MP4/M4V file and after 140 years Plex still hasn’t learned the default location of LMA is - WRONG.
You’ll have to hack that mistake by fixing it for them.
You may need to Plex Dance afterwards - if after moving LMA for all Agents under TV and Movies - Refresh Metadata does nothing.
All Steps, In Order, Exactly as described (or it simply won’t work):
Interesting. By messing around with the “search” stuff I am able to fix some movies, but the behavior is a bit inconsistent. Clicking the same things on different movies doesn’t always work and for some reason selecting a different option from the drop-down that says by default “Auto Match” just closes the dialog, so I’m not sure what it is even supposed to do.
Great, I’ve changed that setting and I hope that “refresh metadata” just works. The annoying thing about that is that the metadata embedded in my movie files is all correct–the files are all created by iFlicks and I can confirm in any number of players that the metadata is correct and complete . The titles are correct, the year is filled in, etc. Plex must just be looking at the title and that’s it, and then ignoring both the year field and the file and folder names which both also have the year.
The Metadata you want in Movies and TV Shows is: NONE
Demoting Local Media Assets is WAAAAY easier than removing all those bogus Title Fields Plex Stubbornly Reads and Reacts to. <---- because Plex can only do what it’s told… tell it to do something else… like NOT give tip-top priority to bogus Title Fields in MP4/M4V files.
In the end:
Movies and TV Shows are correctly matched by their Correct File Names and Structures - not by the bogus information embedded in Title Fields. Period.
It’s very likely you’ll have to Plex Dance some titles that refuse to cooperate. In fact, I’m dam sure of it.
Of course for me, proper tagging remains important because I use way more software than just Plex and almost everything else handles metadata properly. Of course ideally we’d all just be using file systems with proper support for resource forks, extended file attributes and so on, since both using file names and folders and format-specific embedded metadata is ugly as hell.
