naming convention for movies?

General Discussions
1

Hello all, i have a folder with over 600 movie folders. Each folder has the name and year and nothing else, [ie, Unforgiven (2000)]. Plex is only show about 200 of the movies. Is there a particular naming system for inside the movie folders? Or should there be no other folders? thanks

mick

2

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200381023-Naming-Movie-files

/Movies/MovieName (release year)/MovieName (release year).ext

3

as for naming conventions… please check out the media preparation support page for movies.
I personally like to create dedicated folders per movie which allows me to use local media assets such as covers but also movie extras (requires activation of local media assets in Settings > Server > Agents > Movies ...; local media assets can also be used without extra folders but that makes live more complicated in my eyes).

as for 400 of your movies not showing up…

  • what kind of media files is that? please keep in mind, Plex won’t deal with DVD images etc.
  • does Plex have read/write permissions for all those files?
  • when looking into Plex… do you see an indicator in one or more of your movies that there’s multiple versions? If Plex interprets the movies are the same, it’ll put them in the same item, so theoretically each of your 200 movies could have 3 versions of itself – this might happen if you did something like “Blade Runner (1982)”, “Blade Runner (1982) Extended”, “Blade Runner (1982) Director’s Cut”, “Blade Runner (1982) Final Cut” — multi-version movies should have a blue box with a number in the top-left corner of the movie poster; alternatively you can see this in the movie information (edit the movie, go to “Information” section… if there’s more than 1 filename listed, this movie item consists of multiple files)

Generally speaking… if there’s no technical issues, Plex should see all of your movies. If the naming isn’t right, you should still see the movie item in your library but without any metadata as it cannot be matched against Plex’ metadata sources – so no description, director, release data, actors, posters etc.

4

Always use MOVIE_TITLE (YEAR)\MOVIE_TITLE (YEAR).xxx

BTW: Isn’t Unforgiven a WWE event ? If so, then you will need to name it WWE Unforgiven 2000 (2000)


Unforgiven (2000) may work but it’s best to name it like themoviedb does. It eliminates possible issues later on.

5

@tom80H said:

Generally speaking… if there’s no technical issues, Plex should see all of your movies. If the naming isn’t right, you should still see the movie item in your library but without any metadata as it cannot be matched against Plex’ metadata sources – so no description, director, release data, actors, posters etc.

This is really good advice.

6

How to find the discrepancy between number of files on disk and the number of movies in the Plex movie library

7

Thanks everyone for the advice, unfortunately for me most of my movies are in ISO format. Can i convert these and if so which format is recommend, thanks.

the neophyte mick

8

Use either MakeMKV to create MKV files for the movie / potential extras – this will keep the original quality of your movies and all audio/subtitle streams. Alternatively you can use e.g. Handbrake to transcode the content more efficiently (this will re-encode your movies using either h.264 or h.265 codecs (significantly more efficient than e.g. DVD ISOs, potential loss of some details).