Serviio

Some of my movies are not main stream films and therefore do not appear on themoviedb.com or IMDB. Therefore, I am getting some really wild matches that don't even come close. (e.g. "Intermediate Pilates Workout for Dummies" is coming out as "Billy Blanks' Tae Bo")

This is also a problem for home videos, for instance, which do not have a formalized commercial title.

Right now I am making do by using a descriptive graphic image as the thumbnail. So, I navigate by image instead of title. But the movie titles for the ones I am having issues with are completely wrong. Is there any way to just have Serviio use the title of the file on my computer as the movie title or edit the movie title after indexing? I would think it should be straightforward, but I couldn't find a solution online.

I believe the simplest solution is to place all such videos within a separate shared library location, and disable online metadata for that location. That means your new location can't be within an existing Serviio library location.

Let's take an example. Suppose you have all your media on your D: drive (assuming Windows here), and Serviio is looking at the entire D drive as a shared library location. Just making a sub-folder under D won't make any difference. Instead, make two sub-folders on the D drive. One might be labeled "D:\Commercial" and the other "D:\Home". Move all the titles that don't have online metadata into the Home folder, and all other videos go in the Commercial folder. Then remove D: as a Serviio shared library location and add the two new locations. For the Home folder, make sure "Retrieve descriptive metadata" is not checked.

Just make sure you separate the media that has online metadata from the media that doesn't, and you should be good to go.

Thanks. I tried what you suggested. It is simple enough and worked well.

I had previously thought that the "Use original title" setting was supposed to ensure the file name was preserved as the title. It might be good to explain that feature somewhere. If a description exists, I couldn't find on the Serviio support pages.

I believe Use Original Title is still for online metadata retrieval. Many videos have multiple possible titles, especially some of the old 50s Japanese monster movies.