PlexMediaFixup - Run configurable fixups against the media database of a Plex Media Server

Overview

The PlexMediaFixup project provides a command named plexmediafixup that performs certain changes in the media database of a Plex Media Server.

The functionality to perform these changes is organized in plugins called fixups. Each fixup can be enabled or disabled and configured as needed.

Currently supported fixups are:

• sync_title:

  This fixup walks through the movie and episode items of the configured library sections of the Plex Media Server, and syncs the "title" field of each item by setting it to the value of the title tag found in the corresponding media files. The ffprobe command is used to get the title tag from the media files.

  Use this fixup if you properly maintain the title tags in your media files and are not happy with the titles that get set from the metadata sites.

• sync_sort_title:

  This fixup walks through the movie, show and episode items of the configured library sections of the Plex Media Server, and syncs the "sort title" field of each item by setting it to the value of its "title" field.

  Use this fixup if you are not happy with the fact that PMS removes leading articles and other words from the sort title.

• video_genre_cleanup:

  This fixup walks through the movie and show items of the configured library sections of the Plex Media Server, and cleans up the "Genres" field of each item. It can consolidate differently spelled genres into a single genre, remove useless genres, and set a default genre if the list of genres is empty. These changes can be configured in the config file.

• preserve_collections:

  This fixup walks through the movie and show items of the configured library sections of the Plex Media Server, and preserves the collections of each item. This is done by syncing any present collections between PMS and a collections file. This solves the issue that PMS resets the collections every now and then, when updating the metadata of the item. Since the presence of a collection either in PMS or in the collections file causes it to be synced, the intentional removal of a collection now requires removing it from PMS and removing it from the collections file. The collections file is in YAML format and is self-explanatory. The path name of the collections file can be configured in the config file.

Look at the example plexmediafixup config file example_config_file.yml if you want to see what can be configured. It describes each parameter.

This project uses the python-PlexAPI package, and access to the Plex Media Server is specified in the PlexAPI config file. The plexmediafixup command supports a choice of using a direct connection to a network-accessible Plex Media Server (which is the faster choice) or using an indirect connection through the Plex web site (which works from anywhere but is slower).

Installation and configuration

1. Install the latest released version of the plexmediafixup Python package into your active Python environment:

   $ pip install plexmediafixup

   This will also install any prerequisite Python packages, including the python-PlexAPI package.

2. If this is the first time you use the python-PlexAPI package, create its PlexAPI config file as follows.

   If you want to use direct connections to a network-accessible Plex Media Server, specify the following parameters:

   [auth]
   server_baseurl = <URL of your PMS>
   server_token = <server auth token of your PMS>
   

   The server auth token of your PMS can be found as described in Finding your server auth token.

   If you want to use indirect connections through the Plex web site, specify the following parameters. This is simpler to set up compared to direct connections, but every request goes through the Plex web site and from there to your Plex Media Server:

   [auth]
   myplex_username = <your plex account username/email>
   myplex_password = <your plex account password>
   

   The PlexAPI environment variables can also be used.

3. Create a plexmediafixup config file.

   A plexmediafixup config file is in YAML format and specifies some general parameters (such as whether to use direct or indirect connections, or the location of the PlexAPI config file) and the fixups that should be run, including any parameters for the fixups.

   An example plexmediafixup config file is provided as example_config_file.yml. This example config file contains descriptions for all parameters, and describes all supported fixups.

   Create your plexmediafixup config file by copying that example file and modifying it as needed.

   The copy of the example file should work without further modifications. By default, it uses a direct connection and has all fixups enabled and configured to process all items. However, please review your copy carefully and make changes as needed.

4. Install the ffprobe command

   This command is only used by the sync_title fixup.

   On Windows with Chocolatey, on MacOS with HomeBrew, and on most Linux distros, the package containing this command is named ffmpeg. Alternatively, download it from https://ffmpeg.org/download.html.

Usage

To explore the command line options and general usage of the plexmediafixup command, invoke:

$ plexmediafixup --help

The following commands assume that my_config_file.yml is the plexmediafixup config file you have created.

First, invoke the plexmediafixup command in dry-run mode. This shows you what would be changed in a real run without actually doing any changes:

$ plexmediafixup my_config_file.yml --verbose --dryrun

If you are satisfied with what you see, perform the changes:

$ plexmediafixup my_config_file.yml --verbose

Simplified setup and run script

If you want to run the plexmediafixup command regularly, this GitHub repo contains run_plexmediafixup.sh and run_plexmediafixup.bat scripts that simplify the setup somewhat. Copy the script for your OS (.bat for native Windows, .sh otherwise) to a directory in your PATH and modify it as needed.

These scripts have the following prerequisites:

• The plexmediafixup config file exists as $HOME/.config/plexmediafixup.yml or, on native Windows as %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\.config\plexmediafixup.yml
• The PlexAPI config file exists
• The ffprobe and virtualenv commands are available in the PATH

These scripts perform all the setup that is needed (such as checking if the virtualenv and ffprobe commands are available, creating a Python virtual environment, activating it, installing the plexmediafixup package into that virtual environment, checking if the plexmediafixup config file exists), and finally run the plexmediafixup command with that config file.

Trouble shooting

HTTP status 500 Internal Server Error

If the video_genre_cleanup fixup of the plexmediafixup command fails as follows:

Error: Cannot change the genres field of movie 'Star Wars VW Werbung' from [] to ['<keins>']:
  (500) internal_server_error; http://192.168.0.12:32400/library/sections/None/all?type=1&
  id=53458&genre%5B%5D.tag.tag-=&genre%5B0%5D.tag.tag=%3Ckeins%3E
  <html><head><title>Internal Server Error</title></head><body><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></body></html>
  (raised plexapi.exceptions.BadRequest after 0s)
Error: Fixup video_genre_cleanup has encountered errors - aborting

Then one possible reason is that the server auth token is invalid.

To fix this, update the server_token parameter in the PlexAPI config file to the current server auth token (see Finding your server auth token).

Bugs and features

Please report any bugs and request features via the issue tracker.

Contributing

Contributions to the PlexMediaFixup project are welcome; for details see Development.

License

The PlexMediaFixup project is provided under the Apache Software License 2.0.