Hello,
I noticed that the names of the episodes of my series are not detected.
I use the Plex TV Series agent.
The titles are available on TheTVDB.com
Should I change agents?
There is an exemple
Thanks in advance.
What’s the show?
The Flight Attendant Season 2.
I have the same issue with others TV Shows.
Are the shows themselves matched (i.e. do they have metadata)?
I loaded all of my files today and most of the TV shows are not showing up or they only show a few episodes, They are the same format, I can not find anything on how to correct this or add the others.
Follow this guide’s suggestions:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/
Long story short, if you follow that article and name your files properly, Plex will have no problems finding and matching your media.
Trust me, I used to have a particular numbering scheme for my shows. Once I set it up properly, things just clicked in place and Plex has no difficulty identifying media.
To add to the above,
This FAQ is for when you add media but the file permissions don’t allow Plex to see them
(Please do include your logs ZIP file when possible as this would allow us to give best advice the first time)
I am not tech savvy so i appoligize for not having the logs. Not even sure how to do that. I deleted the shows in a try to fix the issue but now it will not even recognize them at all. I gave tried them on a different hard drive. On the laptop but still nothing will show up in the library. It does shpw that it was loooed through durring the activity. I have dug through just about every article i coyld find and nothing is working. What shpyld I try now?
It’d be handy as well if we could see a sample of the show you are trying to add, as well as a screenshot of the folder structure of the show. For example, here is one such show I have, with personal info blotted out (I suggest you do so) and I circled the folder I pointed my Plex server at for indexing.
That provides us with a large amount of info on how your media is structured, how the folders are named, how the episodes are named, and whether you target the correct folder for Plex to index. However, if you follow the naming guide I linked above, then your folder should look an awful lot like my own.
(I don’t include the show name in the files, that information is not TECHNICALLY required by Plex).
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-09-22_16-28-51.zip (3.4 MB)
Here are the logs.
screen shot of the file I try to upload
The above are screen shots of how I keep them labled. I am close to yours just the different is the initial season and episode number. It worked the first time but it is not working now.
Thank you for the help. I am learning a lot
If I may add here?
-
The naming within each series is how Plex can guarantee it’s matching the media correctly.
-
The standard format of naming is:
Top-level-series-folder-for-all-series/
Series Name/
Season x/
Series Name - SxxExx - Optional title here.ext
-
Series Nameis the name as listed on TheTVDB/TMDB. Adding the series starting year in parenthesis is optional but sometimes required when names are reused. -
Season x (obvious grouping by season)
-
Series Name - SxxExx - Optional Title.ext
– Series name - so we know which series this episode file belongs to
– SxxEyy - Season XX Episode YY format to uniquely identify which episode within the season
– Optional title - You can put it there so you know the episode’s title
– ext - (mp4, m4v, avi, mkv, etc)
As example, here is Star Trek The Next Generation
(you can ignore the front part as that’s normal Linux stuff)
[chuck@lizum Downloads.2006]$ cd /glock/media/tv2/Star\ Trek\ The\ Next\ Generation/
[chuck@lizum Star Trek The Next Generation.2007]$ ls -la
total 32
drwxrwxr-x 9 chuck chuck 157 Sep 7 12:49 ./
drwxrwxr-x 61 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 20 00:55 ../
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 21:07 Season 01/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 10:40 Season 02/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 12:49 Season 03/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 10:40 Season 04/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 10:40 Season 05/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 10:40 Season 06/
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 10:40 Season 07/
[chuck@lizum Star Trek The Next Generation.2008]$ ls -la *01
total 205626508
drwxrwxr-x 2 chuck chuck 4096 Sep 7 21:07 ./
drwxrwxr-x 9 chuck chuck 157 Sep 7 12:49 ../
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 17459856182 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E01E02 - Encounter at Farpoint.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 8208418223 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E03 - The Naked Now.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7408405587 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E04 - Code of Honor.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 8177492945 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E05 - The Last Outpost.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7778591152 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E06 - Where No One Has Gone Before.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7544791974 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E07 - Lonely Among Us.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7464676338 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E08 - Justice.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 8235977062 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E09 - The Battle.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7592438789 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E10 - Hide and Q.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7327550940 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E11 - Haven.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7936121950 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E12 - The Big Goodbye.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7756254279 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E13 - Datalore.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7336712840 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E14 - Angel One.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 8004953642 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E15 - 11001001.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7816756197 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E16 - Too Short a Season.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7472408348 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E17 - When the Bough Breaks.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7446017557 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E18 - Home Soil.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7803618847 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E19 - Coming of Age.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7866701942 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E20 - Heart of Glory.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7865111544 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E21 - The Arsenal of Freedom.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7780448181 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E22 - Symbiosis.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7828159453 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E23 - Skin of Evil.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 7765837845 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E24 - We'll Always Have Paris.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 11371863448 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E25 - Conspiracy.mkv
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chuck chuck 11312326727 Sep 7 16:10 Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E26 - The Neutral Zone.mkv
[chuck@lizum Star Trek The Next Generation.2009]$
Ok, if you are targeting the E:\ drive, that is an issue. You need to target the E:\TV Shows folder under it. Do this, and it ought to work for you. I just want to make sure that you are making a TV Show library here, not a Movies library, correct?
Oh, and fix the episode filenames. Each one MUST have the season and episode number in their name. I also suggest release year in parenthesis after the Series Name (like you see in my folder Tremors (1990)). This will save you a lot of headache in the future.
TECHNICAL RUNDOWN
What Plex does when it scans a target folder, is it assumes that every folder on the level just below it is one single show. Plex scans **E:**, sees a TV Shows folder. It gets confused, thinks that is a show. It tries to match the name TV Shows against all the shows in its metadata database. It doesn’t see it, so it fails to match.
However, it valiantly moves on. From there, it digs within the TV Shows folder for any sub folder. At that point it (mostly) stops reading the folder name and digs down deeper. Once it finds a file, it looks for SxxExx* somewhere in the name of the file. It CAN see a single or double digit number if you do it, but it can cause issues. But that is what is happening here.
Every episode you have is simply named “Episode X”. It doesn’t matter that those are in season folders, or in folders named for shows. At this point, Plex stops reading folder names. So it sees a hundred or so different “Episode 1” files. It thinks it is odd, but hey, it has to follow the rules. So it adds all these hundred files as “duplicates” of eachother. If you look at the few episode files you have, you may notice you can pick from a bunch of different “versions” of each episode. This is not good.
/tag team with ChuckPa 
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