This was a 2nd question in another post, but thought it made sense to extract it into its own thread…
Recently I have been renaming all my TV shows using Filebot (it’s a lockdown thing) so, for the first time in a while I have had a bunch of shows to match, all named using the {plex} binding in Filebot.
The {plex} tag only includes the show year when necessary. I get that. But, if you have to do the manual matching, I found myself stuck with which show/year combo I should be selecting and it was no longer in the filename to check.
Question: Is it better to always include the year? (even though you don’t need it
Here’s why I always use Name (Year): You never know when another show might have the same name in the future (MacGyver, Magnum PI), or else a reboot or overseas version of the show (DuckTales, The Office)
Plus, it just seems like a good idea to reduce confusion for the scanner.
(I use a far simpler naming scheme, I simply name the folder “Name (Year)”, then all episodes are contained inside that folder, without separating into season folders. I also don’t bother including the show name in the filenames themselves since Plex uses the folder name. It’s worked flawlessly for the better part of a decade. Yay, Plex crawling behavior.)
wow - I never realised the show could be anything as long as the show-level folder was correct (other than SxxExx) and that even season folders were not necessary. That will shorten a few paths. …I did always think the duplication of the episode title and the show-folder was somewhat redundant.
Definitely. When the folder name is correct, and you’ve numbered the episode filenames properly, that’s typically all Plex needs. Everything else is still useful in case the scanner gets confused for some reason, but generally unnecessary. The longer filenames and season folders are mostly recommended in the forums just for safety’s sake, but I’ve never run into problems without them. My typical path:
D:\Television\Arrested Development (2003)\S01E02 - Top Banana.mp4
The Plex TV scanner doesn’t flinch at that. As long as it has all the basic information it needs in the file path, the heuristics can figure it out quickly. Give it a test on a show and see what happens.
