I know there is a lot of discussion here which I haven’t had time to go over in detail but this should work fine if you just remove the “Star Trek” subfolder and make sure when you edit the TV library it’s then pointing to the folder directly under the show folders in the “Add Folders” tab.
If you want to retain the “Star Trek” subfolder, then you need to add it as a separate path in “Add Folders”
I don’t. Personally I would be lazy and just try to fix the folder structure to see if the TNG abbreviations worked in the file name first lol
That tool i use has several presets for the naming conventions to pick from and i know several of them work. Star Trek S01E01.generic name.mp4. With or without dashes, periods, spaces and you can put the year in the file name it self pretty easy.
He wants a “Star Trek” library section.
Creating that top level and anchoring to it gives him that dedicated section
@ChuckPa I know in a movie name you can put [the square brakets] and it ignores whatever is inside.
Does that work in a folder? in other words could he put TV/TV1/[Star Trek]/Star Trek The Next Generation?
I think Plex would see TV1 but in his file system he would still technically have a Star Trek folder to keep his things easier to organize
No. you can’t hide a directory name.
Instead of hiding it… move the media and be done.
Ok I didn’t think so but I never tried it. Thanks
Just for kicks I put a test file on my server named
Tv Shows / Star Trek The Next Generation /Season 01 / Star Trek TNG s01e01.mp4
It does show up correctly and pulls the right metadata. I know i know it’s not right, but it does work. lol
No guarantees it will work for all of them I guess
In addition to the other tools mentioned in the thread:
If you’ve a Windows system, look at PowerRenamer in Microsoft PowerToys.
It makes it very easy to perform simple pattern matches for renaming folders and files. For example, replacing TNG with The Next Generation for all episodes. You can also use regular expressions if desired (ex: \d to replace any digit).
Tiny Media Manager (Win/Mac/Linux) is a GUI driven program for renaming movies & tv shows. The free version will probably do what you want.
So I am seeing a couple issues:
You should never point plex to the same location that has files (always point it at the directory that contains the show folders)
*** IE HDD1/Star Trek and not HDD1/Star Trek/Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)
and you should never have extra directories in the Plex path: IE use HDD1/Star Trek/ instead of HDD1/
File naming: My standard response: 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 file name and ${showTitle} (${showYear}) {tvdb-${tvShow.ids.tvdb}}/Season ${seasonNr2} as the new directory format.
Often you need to Plex Dance the media to clear any lingering naming issues.
To clarify, I no longer have the folder “Star Trek” under “HDD1”. I have renamed it “Trek” to make sure Plex doesn’t think it’s a show name.
I will also take advice and direct plex to this “Trek” folder, which contains the show folders, rather than pointing it to “Star Trek: The Next Generation” folder.
Thank you for your input, especially regarding the “Plex Dance”. I was under the impression that if I added and removed the media folder from the Plex library that it reset all it’s metadata, clearly it does not. Maybe someone smarter than me can write a script or create a button that does the plex dance automatically.
I have a question about using tinyMediaManager - Does this program automatically rename the files and folders in a way Plex understands? Or does it add metadata to the files so that Plex knows what they are, regardless of how they are named? I just want to know what to expect when using it.
One more question, dbirch
In your file and folder naming format, I’m seeing a lot of dollar signs. Are those supposed to be in the file name or are they representative of something?
i.e. is this formatting correct?
HDD1/Trek/$Star Trek: The Next Generation ($1987)/$Star Trek: The Next Generation - S$4E$2 - $Family.mkv
you may notice I omitted the {tvdb-${tvShow.ids.tvdb}} part, (1) is this part required and (2) how to I determine what goes here?
FYI for anyone looking to use the command line on linux to do file renaming - the tool I am using is “mmv” which can be installed with the command:
sudo apt install mmv
Once you have navigated to the directory where you want to change the file names, here’s how you do it. Everything I type in {curly brackets} including the brackets themselves is replaced with your text
UGGG- the forum takes the text I input and changes it. It thinks asterisks mean italics or something. That’s not what I want, forum.
HUMOR ME - the first argument after “mmv” is apostrophe asterisk {text to be replaced} asterisk apostrophe. What you read below will be wrong, because the forum thinks the asterisk means I want the text to be italicized. Where you see italics, just know that there are supposed to be asterisks around it that got deleted.
mmv ‘{text to be replaced}’ ‘#1{new text}#2’
So for example, if I wanted to replace “Star Trek TOS” with “Star Trek” on every file in the directory, this is the command:
mmv ‘Star Trek TOS’ ‘#1Star Trek#2’
If the text appears twice in the file name, only the first instance mmv finds will be changed. For example, the file name SHOW.S01E01.Pilot.mkv has three periods in it. If I want to replace the first two periods with a dash with spaces on either side, I simply run this command twice:
mmv ‘.’ ‘#1 - #2’
This may not be as graceful as some GUI tools suggested here, but it works, and its a LOT better than what I was doing to set the files up in the first place.
Update: Everything is working correctly now!
Here are the changes I made:
To be frank, I don’t know which of these steps are necessary and which are not, but I suspect the most important were steps 2 and 5. Especially 5. I realize that until I did the “Plex Dance”, Plex was maintaining the old metadata that was WRONG , despite anything that I changed.
Regardless, my issue is now SOLVED! Plex now sees all 7 seasons of TNG and all 3 seasons of TOS!
Thank you to everyone who contributed. Check out this article if you want to know more about using the mmv command:
It meant that renaming all my files took me about 20 minutes instead of several hours, and that includes getting used to how the command worked. I did have to do it manually within each season folder, but that was only 10 folders, and the Terminal’s ability to quickly recall recent commands makes it much less tedious than it would otherwise be.
BOTTOM LINE(S):
Point Plex to the folder which contains (exclusively) your show folders
Use the real, full show name on both the show folders and files
Do the Plex Dance or else Plex won’t actually rebuild the library metadata.
So using TMM, those patterns above ${showTitle} - S${seasonNr2}E${episodeNr2} - ${title} and ${showTitle} (${showYear}) {tvdb-${tvShow.ids.tvdb}} are not patterns for humans. Rather they are strings for TMM’s renaming configuration.
So for TNG S01E04 TMM would output Star Trek The Next Generation (1987) {tvdb-71470}/Season 1/Star Trek The Next Generation - S01E04 - Code Of Honor.ext
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