Can I manage to make PLEX recognize properly my season folder?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.23.5.4841-549599676

I have a TV show directory with a folder with this name which contains episodes from 3rd season:

Season 03꞉ La Ira Imperial de los dioses

Inside that folder:

The Seven Deadly Sins [S3] 01.mkv
The Seven Deadly Sins [S3] 02.mkv
The Seven Deadly Sins [S3] 03.mkv
etc...

However, PLEX thinks that folder contains the episodes from 1st season. It matches the folder as “Season 1” instead of the 3rd season:

If I change the folder name to just ‘Season 03’ all works fine:

but I would like to preserve the name of the season, this part of the text in the folder name: ‘La Ira Imperial de los dioses’.

I can do something without totally deleting that text from my folder name?.

Renaming the file names of the episodes within that folder is not a viable option for me (aesthetically they are as I will). I prefer to rename the folder as “Season 03”, but I would like to know if I can write it in some way that PLEX can match it as the 3rd season while I can still preserve the season name in the folder name (‘La Ira Imperial de los dioses’).

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You can put the name in brackets I think and Plex will ignore it. Since you’re using not quite right naming (see other thread) you sometimes have to fiddle to keep the “not quite right naming” but still be the way you like it to be … sometimes.

So in this case you should be able to get away with:
/Season 3 [name of season]

You might get away with:
/Season Name Season 03

If not, then naming the files S3E01 should work while leaving the folder name as is too - but that’s not what you’d prefer.

Sometimes we just have to conform to the parameters of the software even if it doesn’t match our preferences. :slight_smile:

Edit: I’d also suggest considering your fansub sources. Groups that use more standard naming conventions these days make this a lot easier too.

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4

That’s what I would test too.

I’m curious to hear if this works! Please report back, OP.

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5

I’ve tried renaming the folder as ‘Season 3 [La Ira Imperial de los dioses]’ and as ‘Season 03 [La Ira Imperial de los dioses]’ , but PLEX still think it is season 1. (I deleted and re-added the library to ensure it will get updated properly. no way.)

Thanks anyway for giving me the idea.

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Ah… that’s unfortunate. I am pretty sure Plex ignores anything in brackets for filenames so was hoping it did the same for folders.

If you name the files with S3E01 you can likely keep the name of the season in the folder - it’s up to you which aspect is more important.

Sometimes you can get away with “not right” naming and sometimes you can’t… :slight_smile:

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I do not share that opinion. Conformist people are the ones who will not make thinks to get better, because they will conform with what they have.

In any case I’m not demanding any crazy thing, just that the software manages to parse non-zero-padded episode names, and folders whose name contains the season number and the season name.

We are not ripping bots from the movie pirate scene, file namings like “name s1e01” just sucks aesthetically. We are humans, with a diversity of preferences when organizing our files and structuring the nomenclature pattern. The software is the one who should adapt, as far as possible, to the needs of the users. While we, as users, will of course try to do the same to adapt us to the behavior of the software. But there must be a balance, and when there is a reasonable request (like I think mine were) that could be easily solved from the devs. by adapting / improving their software, it should be done that way.

I think like that. But I’m just expressing what I think haha, I’m not trying to fight you. Thanks for your help, again.

So, I guess I have no choice but to assume, at least for the moment, that I must use “Season 03” as folder name if I want this software to work properly with that folder.

Cheers!

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8

I can appreciate wanting to keep my way over some other “things” way. Totally understand. I also get frustrated with reasons like “the computer says I can’t do that” or similar statements.

After many years dealing with technology I’ve learned you either make your own effort or match other folks effort. In the former, you get things your way. In the later, you get things their way. You just have to find a balance there somewhere. Maybe Emby or Jellyfin might be closer to your way than Plex.

I think that’s fair to say but will point out that the majority of users are not anime fans and anime is definitely an exception to the rule in the TV ripping\media community. Just look at how much codec work was necessary in the past to watch stuff… individual codecs like XVID and custom fonts for subtitle support up to codec packs like CCCP and K-Lite before MPC and VLC came along with bundled codecs but still not “easy” to deal with really… and all could be based around personal file\folder structure.

Anime is just an oddball in this realm and it’s hard for software to account for it while still working well for the majority of other users that don’t need special attention to make things work. :slight_smile:

That being said, anime is popular and there are plugins you can try that will help Plex match anime… it’s just a different effort for you and it’s not “official” so Plex can’t help you with it. I think the scanner is HAMA and you can find stuff about it here: [Rel] HTTP Anidb Metadata Agent (HAMA)

It might be worth checking out. Good luck!

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I just want to point out that there are cases where it would be a real pity to have to rename the directory to delete the name of the season in order that Plex can correctly resolve the season number, since, for example with the iconic anime Slayers serie, its seasons are mostly known around the world by their name rather by the season number. Although in IMDB for example, it classifies the seasons of this serie by season number, which is also a pity.

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I was curious about this as well, so I performed a quick test. In my case, placing season three’s title in square brackets did result in its episodes being placed into season three.

image

When I tested without the brackets, the episodes were placed into season one. I also tested by just placing a hyphen between the season number and the title; this also resulting in the episodes being placed into season one.

My test library is configured to use the Plex TV Series Agent with Episode Ordering set to TheTVDB.

But, in general, I’d recommend sticking to Plex’s recommending naming guidelines.

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Yeah… that’s another oddity with anime too. The seasons get names to differentiate not numbers.

It’s another example of how trying to get software to match common denominator doesn’t work out for odd setups and anime is an odd setup.

One thing you could keep in mind… once you get used to using a Media Center, you care less about the files\folders because the media center is what is presenting your stuff not your files and folders. I don’t fiddle with my files as much anymore now that accessing the files is mostly through media center interface. Just a thought.

It’s clear you’ve put a lot of effort into your media organization so I can appreciate your hesitancy to change it all up just to fit a software tool.

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Ooo… this could mean that when @CSG1986 cleared the library initially they might have missed a step in the Plex Dance.

That’s happened to me for sure. @Volts might like to see that new result.

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Very correct! :smiley:

I love the performance of the new scanners. I miss being able to see the Python code of the old scanners/agents.

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The naming of your season folder as Season 03 [La Ira Imperial de los dioses] is OK, AFAIK.

The main issue are your file names. Naming and Organizing Your TV Show Files | Plex Support

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“S01E01” is very, very ugly aesthetically and unproductive for human eyes. It is a bunch of letters and numbers all together so the human eyes need to do a stop to get the episode number from that block of text. That naming is not productive for human eyes, I insist.

I tried to put a dash to separate the season number with the episode number, like this: “S01-E01”, which minimizes a lot the effort that the human eyes need to get the episode number when reading. Now its a lot faster to check episode names for my eyes, although still not perfect for me, but in any case PLEX doesn’t seem to allow a separator character like that dash, so all my structure of naming pattern is broken… again.

Is there any character like “-” or “_” or a simple white-space that PLEX will allow to separate the season number from the episode number?

Come on, the end-users are not movie ripping bots that publishes episodes with a standardized-but-unproductive numbering format to get “uniqueness” on the world wide web.

I’m not going to use a naming like “Chapter name S01E01.mkv”, first because it makes my eyes to read the text two times to mentally separate the season number from the episode number.

Be honest, that is hard to read, the more chapters in a folder, harder becomes to read for human eyes and to visually search for a concrete episode number. That naming pattern is a unnecessary time consuming for human eyes.

But I am willing to give in to use a more human variant of that pattern, something more understandable and readable for a human, something like “Chapter name [S1] 01,mkv”, “Chapter name S01 - E01.mkv”, “Chapter name [S1 - 01],mkv” and similar alternative naming patterns, with the season number and the episode number separated, that’s the main thing, to make it easy readable.

I am really asking for a crazy thing?.

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Not necessarily crazy… but clearly not compatible with Plex.

You can feel that Hydrogen is the fuel of the future – that won’t make your regular gas / diesel car able to use it.

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But clearly if it is not compatible it is only because developers didn’t added yet support for it. They could manage to do it, to become compatible. If they will, they could manage to parse thousands of different naming patterns using RegEx or other ordinary string comparison techniques.

…but the devs only allow, at least by now, the more illegible and unproductive naming pattern: “S01E01”. Why the reason for this limitation when parsing TV shows folder and file names?.

I’m trying to do a feature request which I’m trying to argue with my best logical arguments from my human point of view.

Feature Request: please devs consider to allow at least a separator character for the season number and the episode number and/or white-spaces between them.

My ideal thing it would be to allow a naming pattern like this:

Chapter name [S1] 01.mkv

But maybe that is asking too much and maybe i could be selfish, so I’ll only request a character separator and with white spaces because I think that could be a versatile and adaptive solution for many more users than just me. Something like this maybe?:

Chapter name S01 E01.mkv
Chapter name S01-E01.mkv
Chapter name S01_E01.mkv

Chapter name S01 E01.mkv

Chapter name S01-01.mkv

Chapter name S01_01.mkv

Chapter name S01 - E01.mkv
Chapter name S01 - 01.mkv

Chapter name [S01] [E01].mkv
Chapter name [S01] [01].mkv
Chapter name [S01] 01.mkv
Chapter name [S1] 01.mkv

Chapter name S01 - E01.mkv
Chapter name S01 - 01.mkv
Chapter name S1 - 01.mkv

Many alternative patterns that in my personal opinion all of them are much better / human eyes productive than “Chapter name S01E01.mkv”.

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I’m not saying this will never happen.
However… if you browse through the forum you’ll see that there’s tons of users suggesting that their personal naming schema isn’t all that crazy and should be added. At some point you end up with requirement for regular end users to provide a regular expression for Plex to determine the individual naming schema because Plex will no longer know which part of a file name represents what information

There is a naming schema.
You can go along with it and should be fine with your files being properly matched… or you can insist on keeping your own individual schema and live with the need to constantly clean up your Plex libraries.

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Don’t you consider your team / the devs. should consider to add more alternative “naming rules” to be more versatile while at the same time those improvements in the name parsers will minimize those tons of end-users that ends publishing a criticism or a request due PLEX doesn’t allow or doesn’t recognize their naming patterns?.

If tons of end-users are founding the same kind of problem because there is a very strict naming schema which doesn’t allow any little change, you can say the current schema is good and optimal?, yes only if the end-user can adapt to the strict rules of the schema.

I think this could have a very easy solution: let the end-user specify a custom regular expression to match season and episode number for folders and file names. Then every single user that is using PLEX will be able to adapt the software’s behavior to match their custom naming patterns.

That will be very easy to use from the end-user side. I don’t pretend to say it can be easy to implement for the devs from one day to another, because I can understand the parsers / scanners are a sophisticated piece of code that will require many changes to implement it. But it could be done some day in the future, don’t?.

If some day the devs, consider to implement that feature, it will be the final solution for the half of the tons of the end-users that once in their lives had a problem with matching episode names.

Yes I know the usage of regular expressions could be considered an advanced feature, for advanced users (although it is not that advanced), not suitable for all kind of end-users. But at least suitable for the half of them.

Consider any of these ideas, please.

Have a nice day everyone!

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FWIW, Plex didn’t invent the episode naming format.

One problem with customizable matching is that it would be additionally complex to support - both in the software, and in the forums.

Another is that the matching logic does quite a bit more than a single regular expression could capture.

I agree that filenames are hard to read. So I’ve moved to tools like Sonarr and FileBot (and Plex) and I no longer treat filenames as part of the “User Interface”.

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One thing does not remove the other. PLEX could have its own sophisticated internal logic for parsing file names and try to identify titles, but if PLEX adds the ability to allow the end-user to specify a RegEx, it means the logic will be temporally REPLACED, then, the only logic that both PLEX and the end-user need to worry about is the RegEx pattern used by the end-user.

A real case example:

I have this (full path) file:

C:\TV Shows\Live Action\Vikings\Season 06\Vikings [S6] 01.mkv

I try to add the file to PLEX as a TV show, and PLEX let me specify two regular expression, one for matching season number and another for matching episode number.

For season number I’ll use:
\[S(\d+?)\]
Or else:
Season (\d+?)

Where grouping $1 will capture the season number.

For episode number I’ll use:
\]\s+(\d+)$
(ignoring file extension)

Where grouping $1 will capture episode number.

Now at this point PLEX is aware about the season and episode numbers. No other internal and sophisticated parsing logic is necessary to be applied.

PS: these two regex are not optimal, and both captures could be simplified in a single regular expression, but with two different regex I think it makes this example easier to understand.