SKYHOUSE.dev Journal

Why: Damien noticed that Plex sometimes shows a video's embedded title and description instead of the name he chose. I verified where that happens before changing anything.

1. What Plex actually does here

I queried all 16 Plex libraries. Plexxx and VR use Plex's Personal Media agent, which takes the embedded title and description: a Plexxx file named Brainrot Gooning Session PMV (2026).mp4 is titled in Plex with its embedded title, and its summary is the embedded description. Every other library uses the Movie/TV agents, with "Prefer local metadata" off and "Use local assets" on. Those ignore embedded titles and descriptions; the only embedded thing they use is cover art, as the poster.

2. What yt-plex now writes

On save and on rename, yt-plex edits the saved file in place with mutagen. That applies to MP4, M4V and MOV only; it's instant and never re-encodes or copies the video. It writes:

• title: the chosen name, without its "(Year)";
• description (and synopsis): the row's new editable Description, prefilled from YouTube or from the uploaded file's own;
• cover art: removed, unless the video is TV or the row says "Keep this cover art".

Uploads and file links now show what's already inside them (title, description, art) before saving. MKV and other containers are saved untouched, and their embedded details are shown read-only. Tested with 7 tests on real MP4s (102 total), and in a browser.

Also: the desktop scale went from 125% to 112.5%.

3. Posters (same day)

Movie-style rows gained a Poster panel. It writes poster.jpg beside the video, which Plex picks up because "Use local assets" is on in every library here. It works for any container and never touches the video file. Sources:

• one-click TMDB posters from the Radarr match (coverage for YouTube specials is spotty: Olga Koch yes, Kelsey Hamilton no);
• "Find a poster", which opens Damien's own Google Images tall-image search for the cleaned-up title. We deliberately don't scrape Google: its bot detection and terms make that unreliable;
• pasting or dropping an image, or its address, or choosing a file. There's always a preview first, and the image is normalized to JPEG with FFmpeg.

Update (later that day): at Damien's suggestion, the panel moved under the video thumbnail as Update poster, with a "(how does this work?)" hover. The thumbnail spot now shows the poster: first a pending preview, then the saved poster.jpg (tall), and otherwise the YouTube thumbnail. An image can also be dropped straight onto it. We flagged one wrong assumption: the YouTube thumbnail is not the default poster. Without a poster.jpg, Plex uses its own match's poster or a frame from the video.

yt-plex records which poster.jpg files it wrote. An owner's own poster is never overwritten without an explicit "Replace", and never deleted. Commit 5a9c0b3, 109 tests.

Net effect: whatever Plex agent a library uses, a saved video's title and description are the ones Damien chose.