Green Field Install of TV Shows does not see any files in the library... after several attempts to set up / update

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.26.1.5772
Player Version#:1.44.0.2981-e2d72ac2
Narrative - I have recently added TV Shows to a my Media Server. It has been working great on Movies (3 6TB Drives) and Music. But when I added 3 different shows of 3 to 5 seasons on a dedicated drive (6TB), the library is not added. The drives, especially the drive with the directory called ‘TV Shows’ such as I:\TV Shows, all all recognized by the media server app (all drives are local to the windows server on Windows Version 10).
I have completely uninstalled Plex Media Server, moved away the previous files located in User/‘name’/appData/Local/Plex Media Server/ complete in the installation, saving the original files.

With the new install, I was able to recreate my movie library, songs and photos. However, TV will not come back, no matter what I have done. I have used the data base dump and restore, as described in one of the posts.

I would include my logs, but I am not sure which / where those specific logs should be posted. If instructed / or linked to an article I will upload them.

Can you help? Thank you.

2

Before digging into any logs…
How are your tv-show files organized and named inside that TV Shows folder?

If Plex cannot recognize a structure or associate the files to seasons/episodes, they won’t be added to your library.

3

Thank you for the very quick response. I appreciate your help.

As I understand the convention, I three (I have 300, but I started with 3) programs. All in the /TV Shows directory. The structure for one show would be:
f:/TV Shows/CADFAEL (1994)/Season 01/title_t01.mkv

I am lead to believe that the TV Database will assign episode names so I have only used this nomenclature. I have 4 seasons in the CADFAEL (1994) Subdirectory, each named Season 0#, where # ranges from 1 to 4, each naming its one subdir of CADFAEL. In each Season Subdir, there are 4 episodes each with the naming convention of title_t0#.mkv, where # ranges from 1 to 4. (Nice symmetry in this example)

I hope that is a good example.

4

Your file organization seems ok. Just make sure to name the files themselves properly:

F:
  TV Shows   <- your Plex library points to this folder
    CADFAEL (1994)
      Season 01
        CADFAEL (1994) - s01e01.mkv

If you want to you can include the episode title for better recognition after the sXXeYY pattern… however that’s entirely optional.

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If you want to save yourself a lot of time I would recommend using Download - tinyMediaManager and use ${showTitle} - S${seasonNr2}E${episodeNr2} - ${title} as the new name format.

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When I changed my naming convention for the individual files from title_t0#.mkv to the format you gave - s##e##, the collections began to appear. It appears I need to change the other shows in a similar manner. Thank you. I will have a lot to convert for Babylon 5 and X-files, I am afraid… Thank you again. I will mark this resolved.

7

There’s apps that can help you with that. There’s e.g. Filebot or TMM (as mentioned by @dbirch above).

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