I’m sure that this has been asked about/requested before - but from what I can tell the threads for those discussions have been closed, yet this is still something affecting Plex.
Given that iTunes is a fairly dominant media library organizer, I would have expected Plex to support the same folder structure out-of-box, even if it’s not the “preferred” folder structure. I’m not suggesting a breaking change that would completely wreck libraries, but at least adding support for a more succinct file structure would be beneficial.
iTunes uses the format:
/TV Shows/ShowName/Season 2/17 Episode_Title.ext
Compare that with the Plex format:
/TV Shows/ShowName/Season 02/ShowName – s02e17 – Optional_Info.ext
Where Optional_Info is almost always the episode’s title.
Plex obviously requires a much more verbose filename, which has redundant information from the directory structure. So long as the name of the show is short, this is acceptable. However, if the show name is too long, this can cause actual problems.
Consider these examples:
183 chars:
/TV Shows/Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon_/Season 01/Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon_ – s01e14 – Is It Wrong to Expect a Hot Spring in a Dungeon_.mp4
197 chars:
/TV Shows/Rise Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Season 01/Rise Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – s01e22 – Turtle-dega Nights_ The Ballad of Rat Man_The Ancient Art of Ninja Hide and Seek.mp4
224 chars:
/TV Shows/WorldEnd_ What do you do at the end of the world_ Are you busy_ Will you save us_/Season 01/WorldEnd_ What do you do at the end of the world_ Are you busy_ Will you save us_ – s01e02 – Late Autumn Night's Dream.mp4
I believe that Windows has a 260 char limit in file paths… In other words, let’s hope this particular library is located on the root of the disk. If it lives somewhere inside a user’s home directory, there’s a good chance that it could hit that path length limit.
As it stands right now, if you attempt to use the iTunes format for a folder structure, episodes get joined together as “parts” (e.g. Completely separate episodes 1 and 14 get joined together as “parts” in Plex) seemingly at random and with no way to separate them. This happens regardless of the file metadata, which has the correct episode numbers - even if the local media assets agent is the first in the list.
If the more succinct file name can’t be supported, then can we at least get a feature to split auto-detected parts into different episodes?
