From the support for “Naming ‘Series’ & ‘Season’ Based TV Shows”, it states that the following format should be followed:
TV Shows/ShowName/Season XX/ShowName - sXXeYY - Optional_Info.ext
However, while rendering a new episode of a particular “ShowName” a temporary filename of “s01-6”.mkv was used. As this file was being rendered into the “ShowName/Season 01” directory, the metadata for the episode was downloaded and displayed for the season even before the file finished rendering.
Is the “ShowName” no longer required in the media file name? Does Plex now assume that the grandparent directory name is the “ShowName” when none is supplied?
With “rendering” you mean optimize?
@HowardParr said:
Is the “ShowName” no longer required in the media file name? Does Plex now assume that the grandparent directory name is the “ShowName” when none is supplied?
The ‘show folder’ name has always been very important. You can indeed leave out every detail from the indivdual episode file names, if their containing folders are named exactly to standard. This is the absolute minimum in regards to naming.
But the ‘optimized’ versions only exist in addition to their originals. Their naming is not very important, as long as the originals are properly named.
But if you adopt this minmal style for your original file names I see potential trouble.
If somehow due to an error while copying/moving/organising you remove these files from their folders or you end up mixing several episode files into a different folder (maybe even from different shows) then there is no way for you to sort this mess out.
So the recommendation to include at least the show name into the file name of episodes is absolutely valid and should still be followed.
Plex uses ‘heuristics’ to match files to a particular show/movie. Adding the show name to the episodes’ files names provides more ‘certainty’ for these heuristic algorithms.
This in turn helps differentiating when there are several shows with very similar names etc.
