How do you manage your media's (naming convention and metadata)?

[Malathan]

My mindset is still with manually managing my files and associated metadata. Carry over from Kodi I guess.

I am curious how others manage their libraries and new movies/tv shows. Do you let plex do all the work scraping, or generate nfo files ahead of time and use a local scraper to import them?

For me, I use Ember Media Manager to scrape my movies and TV shows. The problem is EMM does not work with with naming convention of plex if multiple episodes exist in same file (it expect s01e01e02e03e04, whereas plex is s01e01-e04).

I have an app I wrote to augment EMM to move movies into their own folder, and rename tv shows in Kodi/EMM naming convention to plex’s naming convention. Now I am looking to expand it to do additional logic such as look into plex’s database (api call) to read metadata in as well as compare to local nfo file, all auto renaming of files if they are behind the scenes and such, and such. Then will switch to EMM for scraping, and then finally move into my movie folder for plex to then read.

So basically, as an engineer, I am probably …uhm…over-engineering the whole process. So curious what others do?

[OttoKerner]

@Malathan

The problem is EMM does not work with with naming convention of plex if multiple episodes exist in same file (it expect s01e01e02e03e04, whereas plex is s01e01-e04).

The problem is that Plex handles these multi-episode files very poorly. So I avoid them wherever I can and either split the files

[HowTo]: splitting multi-episode files with MKVtoolnix GUI

The purpose of this HowTo is to split videofiles which contain more than one episode of a tv show into single-episode files. So they show up individually within plex, can be played individually and don’t produce any of the weird things that multi-episode files are plagued with. The tool used is MKVtoolnixGUI it is freely available for all major PC operating systems. Therefore the container format of the output files will be MKV. The input format can be a multitude of containers like AVI, MP4…

or just add the first episode of a multi-eps file.

Do you know this?

Metadata agents for exported XBMC library

If you already have metadata in XBMC, and would like to use that in Plex. I took the [code posted by Harley Hooligan](http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/16293-nfo-agent/page__view__findpost__p__97610), and changed it to work with my files. In XBMC, go in Settings > Videos > Library > Export Video Library. Choose Separate files & Export Thumbnails and fanart, and optionally overwrite existing files. This will create .nfo & .jpg files for your TV Shows and Movies, in the appropriate di…

[Malathan]

Yea, I use that metadata agent for the nfo files I generate locally. As I said, I tend to like more control over what is created, thus use EMM to do the nfo files and the “Metadata agent for exported XBMC” to pull them in. Thus my question of what do others do to manage their libraries and metadata?

As far as the multi-episodes, you are right OttoKerner, they don’t work well. Even worse is when you have a file composing of multiple seasons (few anime dvd’s I have had S1 and S0 special features in same file). This is where the MKVtoolnixGUI was extremely useful (and much easier to use than I had expected).

[CWallace]

One of the reasons I started using Plex is that I DIDN’T want to have to manage metadata anymore. So I submitted to “the Plex way” and learned how it wanted files named for it’s scanners to work correctly. I changed my workflow for new discs and reworked the existing library. Works great for me. It’s actually a rarity for me to have a mis-step anymore. Once in awhile I’ll go in a pick a different poster or something like that. Much less management.

Now that they’ve added Collections I’m having to learn the in’s and out’s of that. But so far I really like what it adds to my library with minimal effort. The biggest thing there is to check ‘collection’ tags when I add new media.

I can’t tell you how many posts I see in these forums that are rooted around trying to name and organize media some other way than the Plex way. It just affects too many things to ignore.

Oh, and Filebot. Seriously. Love this tool. I wish Plex would purchase it and include it in a scanner Preview & correct tool. Might be able to retire doing the “Plex Dance” so much.