Hey Plex friends. I have a unique library of video files, and so far, it’s been largely unusable via Plex. These aren’t movies or tv shows that will show up in a name-matching repo somewhere. They’re recordings of Drum Corps International World Championships performances.
My files are not named consistently, so I’ll be renaming them all, and I want to get to them to work the best I can within the Plex convention.
The files are generally stored like this:
DCI Finals
—Year (e: “1994”, “2010”, etc)
-------GroupName-Year-ShowName-ExtraInfo.ext (ex: “Blue Devils-1994-My Spanish Heart-01.mp4”)
Ideally, the files would know about the following info:
- Year
- Group Name
- Show Name
- Placement (this could go, but I’d reaaaaly like to capture it somewhere.)
I’ve tried treating them as “Other Videos”, but it seems like the year and placement would have to be part of the title at that point. And I can use a collection to keep them in a year grouping in this case. Still a little wonky.
I’ve tried treating them as TV shows with the year as a season and episode as placement. “s1994e01-Blue Devils-My Spanish Heart.mp4”. That does split them by year, but doesn’t pickup the group name or show name. In this case, It would be awesome if the Plex Title was “Blue Devils - My Spanish Heart”. The season and episode show up as “1994 - Episode 1” which fits year and placement nicely.
Seems like treating them as TV gets me closest. Is there some way I could name the files so that “Blue Devils-My Spanish Heart” showed up as the Plex title automatically? Barring that, is my best option to rename files with s1994e01-whatever.ext, and then edit the title of each movie in Plex? (ugh…I have thousands…but will do it if that’s the way).
Any other ideas on how to use Plex to organize these videos?
Thanks!
