Here is an example:
MasterClass: Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication
This works fine, but you can’t name a file that because of the colon. So in the file directory you see…
MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication
PLEX will never find this in THETVDB because the colon isn’t in the name. So can PLEX still think it is a match by ignoring the missing colon? You would be amazed the number of times this comes up.
The general rule is: If the official name has any letters/symbols you cannot include in a file name… just leave them out (don’t replace them etc.).
So indeed, the files for “MasterClass: Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication” should be named “MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication” (no colon on systems that don’t allow colons in file names)
True, but if you do that, PLEX can’t get a match. So you have to manually match it by putting the colon back into the match phrase. This is a PITA so it would be cool if the scanner took this into account.
so far I’ve never had issues with that…
which Plex Media Server version are we talking about? I take it it’s on a Win10 machine?!
1.19.3.2831 and yes it is on a win 10 pro machine.
I can not recall having that issue, I have recently updated a lot of content to 1080P. No issue, but i will say (Year) in movies seem very important
Year is, but on a lot of TV shows (which this is) there are a lot of colons for some reason. And none of them will match automatically.
I just recently added Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Alternative Architecture to my library.
Files are named like the below and matched perfectly:
TV Shows
Ghost in the Shell - Arise - Alternative Architecture (2013)
Season 00
Ghost in the Shell - Arise - Alternative Architecture (2013) - s00e02.mkv
...
just figured that I actually did not just drop the colon but replaced it by a dash… which luckily didn’t cause the matching to fail
I did all the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, that come to mind without Colons. But I’m using Mac, maybe there something in that
I’ve added 1300 movies in the last 2 weeks - all named by FileBot - ALL with no punctuation at all - all but about 6 got a natural match requiring no Search look-up at all… so I can’t say if there’s something wonky with that bit.
People that are having to Fix Match this often - ain’t doing something right - or something is wrong.
I suspect a LOT of it is Public Enemy #1:
And you can take that to the bank.
To quote above
“The general rule is: If the official name has any letters/symbols you cannot include in a file name… just leave them out (don’t replace them etc.).
So indeed, the files for “MasterClass: Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication” should be named “MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication” (no colon on systems that don’t allow colons in file names)”
Mine was named as specified and it didn’t match until I did a manual match and added the colon.
Let’s take the full spec 
According to the naming conventions (see link shared by JuiceWSA above), your files should be named like this:
TV Shows <- the folder linked to your Plex library
MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication
Season 01
MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication - s01e01 - Meet Your Instructor.ext
MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication - s01e02.ext <- as the episode name is optional and ignored by Plex
MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication - s01e03.ext
...
TV Shows and Movies are different, oh let me count the ways, but I can’t say I’ve had much trouble with that either - Filebot gets the name they use, removes all punctuation and I get a natural match a lot of the time, but not nearly as successful as a Movie match at TMDB.
I haven’t noticed any issue with a colon in the rare case a Fix Match is required, but I will keep my (good) eye open.
Since I don’t have this show my good eye took at look at it and found no natural match named thusly:
A TV Show Library\
.....MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication\
........Season 01\
...........MasterClass Robin Roberts Teaches Effective and Authentic Communication - s01e01 - Meet Your Instructor.mp4
Snake Eyes…
I went to TVDB, like I would if it didn’t immediately match at TMDB (which it does not) to see what’s wrong, but in that moment when the ID# 382510 is all up in my face I just grabbed that and in 2 seconds this thing was matched and I was doing pictures…lol
It was easier to grab that ID# than to bash my head against the reason a perfect file name and structure didn’t get the job done, but it surely did not.
I’ll confirm a bug of some sort when a perfect file name produces lawn sausages.
Note:
pay no attention, or do, to Ingrid Bergman.
our ‘show’ has no episode thumbs (or much of anything else), so my test file has Ingrid… Enjoy.
This has ALWAYS been an issue for me, past five or six years and i just deal with it. But recently ive been adding a ton of “Scooby - doo : …” and its become maddening.
Im having this exact problem with \Scooby-doo Behind the Scenes (1998)\ right now. Yes there should be a dash between “doo” and “behind” in the files/folders, but why am i unable to match it manually? No amount of finagling would get Plex to get any matches, with both the dash and colon added back in, one, the other, neither again, both again. Star Trek: Short Treks at least just matched when i put the colon back in. But for Scooby BTS i had to go dig up the TVDB id to finally just plug that in, and thought id look for a solution/place to complain about it also, so here i am.
Maybe its different through the backend, but searching via the website returns the correct result for every punctuation combination i tried, so why the heck did i still had to go look up the ID#?
https://thetvdb.com/search?query=Scooby+doo+Behind+the+Scenes
https://thetvdb.com/search?query=Scooby-doo+Behind+the+Scenes
https://thetvdb.com/search?query=Scooby-doo-+Behind+the+Scenes
https://thetvdb.com/search?query=Scooby-doo%3A+Behind+the+Scenes
One other thing thats come up when having to match stuff by hand because of punctuation being ignored by Plex (or unavailable in the OS)… when you redo a search, why does it default back to the original query? The one that already didnt work once? When you go back to search again shouldnt it be your last search instead of resetting completely? So you can fix the second try that also didnt work?
Ooo, and since Plex sorting ignores the “The”, could search also somehow recognize , The at the end of a foldername, or just ignore “the” in general? If its already excluding “-” from the default search queries, why not also “the”, AND then ignore them, and also especially “:”, in the search result? Cuz that works too.
I am having exactly this issue with the “Star Trek: Lower Decks” TV show.
Plex attempts to find a match for “Star Trek Lower Decks” and is unable to.
If I do a manual search for “Star Trek: Lower Decks” Plex finds a match.
The files full path is:
“D:\Plex\TV Shows\Star Trek Lower Decks\Season 1\Star Trek Lower Decks - s01e04 Moist Vessel.mkv”
Yeah, there are lots of people that want PLEX to be able to parse names like “Great Gatsby, The” or “Sound of Music, The”. I’m not that concerned with that as I can put the right name and it works. My concern is not being able to put the right name in at all as in the case where the name includes a charachter that Windows doesn’t allow.
Star Trek: Lower Decks, Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels all require me to manually match episodes. This is an annoyance I’ve been dealing with for a while now. I don’t know why it seems to only impact tv shows and not movies but there you go.
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