Custom Scanner Help

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

Hi all, i am trying (and struggling) to create a custom Plex Scanner to pick up my show.



My TV Shows are in the following format





Lost/Season 1/01 - Episode Name.avi



For UK TV Shows we use Series instead of season, so some of them are in this format:



The IT Crowd/Series 1/01 - Episode Name.avi

(Although i’m not too worried if i have to rename the Series folders to Seasons.)



I just want to get Plex to identify the shows using folder name for season with a custom scanner and have so far been struggling.



I don’t want to have to rename all my files due to the fact that i have 3 or 4 other devices, network shares, UPNP Servers etc all using these files in their current format.



I presume i need to change some custom regex to pick them up in this format, but i am really struggling with it.



Any help would be MUCH appreciated.



Thanks,

Mark

2

Same problem here: Unhappy with Front Row and now forced to look for a replacement due to its disappearance in Lion,

I found Plex and feel quite comfortable with it.



The Front Row legacy left me with the following hierarchy: //



For some reason - and quite surprising to me - even though this naming scheme does not match the expected ones

Plex found almost anything. For some reason, e.g. in Season 5 of Deep Space Nine, the first 23 episodes are correctly

recognized but episodes 24 to 26 are missing.



I started to create a custom scanner following the instructions found on this forum, i.e. copy and rename the existing series scanner,

use it as the default scanner for TV Shows, etc.



Trying to understand the scanner I added some print statements but just as already stated here the text didn’t show up anywhere

when I manually started the scanning.



So I wonder why most of the series are found while some episodes are missing (even the mp4 tags are correct).



And I suppose there are other people out there that have a similar hierarchy and want to use Plex.



PS: I even tried the new scanner from this post

but it just left me with any TV Show marked with a yellow exclamation mark sign :frowning:

3

So you manually started the scan from the command line just like Elan posted? Then print result should pop up in the Terminal just fine.

1. Are you sure you have changed the scanner for that section you are trying to scan?
2. Did you place the scanner at correct location? ~/L/AS/PMS/Scanners//
3. See here for more info on above http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/19396-how-to-install-a-custom-scanner/
4

I followed the instructions on this post.


I'm pretty confident that the copy of the default scanner was installed correctly as it was listed in the scanner combo box when I edited
the section. Even more, a syntax error in the modified scanner showed up in the console application so Plex has used this new scanner.

I did some experiments yesterday, one was installing Plex on a "fresh" computer - and voila, all episodes of DS9 have been found.
This leaves me with the following questions:

[list=1]
[*]Does a re-scan really work? I deleted my TV Series section, emptied the trash can and added the section anew and now all episodes are found.
[*]Do mp4 tags win over naming conventions? This would explain why my files are correctly recognized (iTunes seems to fill in these tags as expected).
[/list]
5

I’ve created a simple java program to rename tv shows for plex. It only works for one season at a time - but its only a start. Any suggestions/comments you have would be greatly appreciated.

TV Renamer.zip (224 KB)

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