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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

For me, Plex falls flat in that it seemingly can't handle non-formal video files like home movies, in that it isn't able to search for words within file names, and it is very painful to view long filenames.

I posted on the support forums at least twice and was told (not sure if by maintainers or just other users) that I'm basically an idiot for wanting to do that.

So, I am very looking forward to something new in this space.

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Yes, for something that is so full-featured and sophisticated, I found the media filename issues to be exasperating.

For those that aren't familiar with it, Plex REQUIRES a particular filename format. If you happen to have a media file that is named "wrongly" it either won't show up or it will try to randomly guess what it is so that it can display DVD-title image in your library. There appears to be no way to just force it to accept whatever filename you want. (This might have changed in the last year or so since I uninstalled Plex).

Most of the workflows that feed into Plex handle this pretty seamlessly. To be honest, I never even knew it had an issue, so I'm speaking out of a state of blissful ignorance of filenames—but that's how I want it to be, so can't complain.

Agreed that the rigidity around library matching is disappointing; I've found this is the case with most of these media scanners, and not just Plex specifically. XBMC allowed the user to add his/her own regexes to the matchers last time I tried it, but I don't think that Plex does.

I understand that there are potentially infinite permutations, but I think at least a slightly broader set of default regexes and/or a better way to fingerprint would be a lot nicer. Seems one could hash chunks of the file and compare against a database to identify media without considering the filename at all; that'd be the most convenient.

If Plex isn't matching what you want, mark the media type "Home Videos". That matches everything.

> If Plex isn't matching what you want, mark the media type "Home Videos". That matches everything.

Does it do wildcard search then? Last time I checked Plex wasn't capable of "select * from movies where filename like 'whatever', and from reading the forums this was very much not accidental, it seemed to be a matter of principle to them for some reason.

Even if that works, the inability to view long filenames is a deal breaker anyways for me (again, I have a feeling the answer to this would be "you're doing it wrong").

I know that there are extensions to accept XBMC/Kodi-style .nfo XML files for metadata. I would think it possible to use those to tell Plex to use whatever you explicitly set as the title.

I moved from Plex to Emby for exactly that annoyance. (Emby is better but not perfect on that issue...)

Thanks for introducing Emby, never heard of it. The retarded handling of filenames was exactly why I stopped using Plex!

TBH, I might have used something else entirely, but I had a Roku hooked to my TV which I've been completely happy with for the other channels it provides, and so Emby won out for me because it also has a Roku channel.

As a long time plex user, I'm tempted to try out Emby simply for one reason.- that is the GPU assisted transcoding. Plex still doesn't have hardware transcoder support.

Actually there are various ways to get proper matches without the exact filenaming convention they recommend. There's a feature where you can "Fix Incorrect Match" described here:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201018497-Fix-Inco...

This lets you pick the movie/show/whatever manually from a few different sources. If your media isn't immediately recognized, you can do this to correct it.

Additionally, they have a "Personal Media" metadata agent you can select for media that's your own personal media (like home videos) which will allow plex to read the metadata directly from the file instead of searching for a match. There's more info on that here:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200265246

I have never had the issue you described where something doesn't show up at all, just that it's incorrectly matched (in which case the tile will just show a screenshot and the title will just be the filename)

Additionally, I've found that if you use their recommended folder structure, the filenames matter much less. For example, if you have this directory:

/Media/TV Shows/Show Name/Season 1/

It seems like as long as the file contains the season/episode like "S01E01" it will match correctly based on the directory information. I haven't messed with it much but I have never had to rename a file to get plex to recognize it when I use directories like this

Thanks, this makes me want to give Plex another try.

It is really great, I have it running on two cheapo linux VMs as well as my gaming box back home. It's great to be able to watch on my phone, iPad, netbook, laptop, desktop etc and the Fix Incorrect Match feature works just fine.. I don't even create the Season XX folders, just /media/TV/ShowName/Filename.SxxExx.mkv{or whatever} and most multi-worded series dont match correctly by themselves, editing it once and putting spaces in works 95% of the time.

> can't handle non-formal video files like home movies,

FWIW I have videos on my Plex system ranging back for several years taken from at least 3 different cameras (highest end from only a Nikon V1 mirrorless though) and 5 phones/tablets.

I can't say I've played all of these back on all devices, but I have (or have had) a Nvidia Shield, Chromecast, Samsung ~2012 Smart TV, Roku2, Asrock Ion 330 running Plex Home Theater on Win8 and later Win10, as well as a couple phones/tablets and PC (via web UI) as an interface to Plex.

Really the only time I've ever had a playback issue is when my made-from-old-parts server has the CPU maxed out due to some other app going crazy, and then Plex playback will pause a couple times a minute. I really can't think of any time I've had content it just can't play.

I'm a big fan of Plex. I started using MythTV back in mid-2000s, switched to SageTV for a few years (due to the awesome HD300 devices), and very reluctantly (at first) switched to Plex ~3-4 years ago.

Oh, it will play them just fine, but good luck finding the video you're looking for when the keyword starts at the 50th character in the filename.

"Oh, that's such an edge case" - well, sure, but it is also completely not difficult to implement:

a) wildcard search on filenames

b) add a list mode that shows the complete filename, rather than having to sit and watch it scroll (say you've got 50 videos number #1 thru #50 and you want to play #39 - have fun with that)

I use to use Plex and really liked it. If I ever got a TV again, that's what I was going to use, but I had no idea it had a 50 character filename search limitation. That's so weird!

Oh no, there's no limit, it just can't search filenames (last time I checked anyways), and there's no practical way to view long filenames.

There's a thumbnail view, a detailed view, and a list view. Does the list view truncate the title? I only started using Plex a few days ago but I don't recall it cutting names short when I swapped to the List View for a moment.

I'll check again tonight when I get the opportunity - but I imagine a name would need to be quite long for List View to not be good enough (assuming it doesn't truncate).

Thank you gregmac for checking and reporting in with your findings. :)

I just checked on mine:

* Unless there is other metadata, the filename becomes the title, and the title is searchable.

* Text search appears to be fulltext-style:

  * A title like "2017-01-12 09-23-45.mpg" will be found with a search for "01-12". 

  * "20170112" is found when I search for "201701" but not if I search for "0112".

* The web UI list view is quite wide, but still appears to truncate after about 80 characters (even though that's less than half the screen width on my 1920px wide monitor).

Well that's fantastic news, glad to see they changed their mind.

Sadly, it still fails for me as many of my file names are quite long with the differentiating aspect being beyond the 80th character. The option to wrap filenames would fix that problem.

You have to mark the right media type in Plex. "Movies" and "TV" will match against specific regexes, otherwise they won't show up. "Home Videos" will match everything. I host my home videos via Plex and it works fine. I also host a Downloads folder as media type "Home Videos" for miscellaneous videos because this is the only way to get it to match everything.

With XBMC, you used to be able to go back into the library settings and add/change the regexes yourself (was useful on shows like Avatar that would call seasons "books"). I wasn't able to figure out how to do this with Plex.

Recently Plex has become quite unstable for me. Constantly causing clients to disconnect, even when they're on the local network. All started happening after they added in th "brain" feature.

Plex doesn't manage your media, it just presents it and makes it accessible, if you want media managers look at Sonarr (https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr) and Radarr (https://github.com/Radarr/Radarr)

It looks like your posts are being autokilled (and mostly for good reason). I vouched for this one.