Hello, I’ve got some educational videos that I’ve added to Plex and they’re not listed in any database. I’ve named them in my folder “NAME - SXXEYY - Episode Name.avi” (per Plex naming convention) but Plex still just imports them as Episode 1, Episode 2, etc.
Any tips on how to make Plex import the episode name, without manually renaming them in Plex?
The default plex scanners don’t take the episode name from the file names. They always rely on an online metadata server to supply them.
But it is not very likely for ‘instructional videos’ to even appear in such a metadata server…
The only chance would be with mp4 files. Those support internal matadata tags. The episode name could be embedded in such a tag and Plex would be able to read from there.
If you can’t convert your videos to mp4, you’ll have to use a modified ‘Personal Media Shows’ scanner and agent.
The downside is, that you can only use it, when you create a dedicated library for this content. This is because you can only use one type of ‘scanner’ for a library.
But if this library consists of stuff like ‘instruction videos’ anyway, it is probably even a good thing.
Read on:
Extended Personal Media Shows agent (together with its accompanying custom scanner). It reads the episode title from the file name.
(and show + episode summaries from an external text files! Perfect for videos where no online metadata can be found.)
Install ‘scanner’ and ‘agent’ like so:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201187656-How-do-I-manually-install-a-channel-
This does seem like a lot of effort. It seems logical for the default PMS behavior to actually be to pull the episode title from the file name if it can’t be found in a database. Especially since Plex recommends all files be in the “Show - SxxExx - Title.mkv” naming convention but seems to ignore the title entirely based on OttoKerner’s response.
