Grouping documentaries

General Discussions
1

I’m trying to organize my documentaries. I started with American Experience and discovered there are no entries in theTVDb. So I created a library for videos with no agent. I dropped in two files (Custer’s Last Stand (Part 1).avi, Custer’s Last Stand (Part 2).avi) into a folder American Experience. I can manually change the titles and posters but how do I get it to group them? I would like it like TV shows where they’re grouped by show. Is that not possible? Is there an easier way to do what I want? Plex is so clever, how can it seem to be some dumb with this? Or does the Plex-verse not ‘do’ documentaries? Or am I missing something?

2

what about this one?
[“American Experience” on TVDB](https://www.thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=71638&lid=7 ““American Experience” on TVDB”)

if you want to handle them as TV Shows (probably the easiest way, noticing how many episodes there have been since 1988), naming should be like this:
TV Shows > American Experience (1988) > Season 24 > American Experience (1988) - S24E02.avi

if you have the episode split in 2 files:
TV Shows > American Experience (1988) > Season 24 > American Experience (1988) - S24E02-pt1.avi
TV Shows > American Experience (1988) > Season 24 > American Experience (1988) - S24E02-pt2.avi

You cannot use the “Home Video” category to create a structure like with a TV Show.
in case you have a files that don’t match The TVDB but you want to organize them as a TV Show:

  1. Create a TV Show library
  2. Set the agent to “Personal Media Shows”
  3. Edit the metadata according to your liking (or in case you use MP4/M4V you can edit the file’s metadata and tell the library to use embedded metadata)
3

D’oh! I searched TVDb for “American Experiance”. LOL. I should learn how to spell!
Now that I see it in there, I can see it should be one file. So I merged it into a MKV with MKVToolNix GUI. I named it “\American Experience\Season 24\S24E02 Custer’s Last Stand.mkv” and it picked it right up. Thank you very much. This is much easier.

4

just to double-check…
it should be \American Experience\Season 24\American Experience - S24E02 Custer's Last Stand.mkv – not \American Experience\Season 24\S24E02 Custer's Last Stand.mkv.

Edit: fixed code formatting

5

Roger. Actually I ended up doing this:
\American Experience\Season 24\02 Custer’s Last Stand.mkv
Amazingly Plex understands. I like this because I hate redundant information in the path.

6

it’s a gamble… the tv show scanner is very touchy when it comes to names. keep in mind you deviated from the naming schema in case your Plex server starts mixing up content at some point in the future (too many examples when you look through the forums).

7

Of course. I usually start verbose then whittle it back. But if it ever goes sideways, I’ll go verbose again. Thanks again.