Hoping someone can help me get my show information sorted.
I’ve got a smallish media library (16TB) and have been unable to get Plex to a point where I can sorting out what it’s misidentified. My latest attempt was to point it at a small subsection of media (~200 TV Series) and it correctly identified about 4 and then threw everything else into a few random shows (286 Episodes of “The Amazing Race” - which I don’t have a single episodes of) and 4 or 5 other odd non existent shows with hundreds of episodes. I tried to just browse by folder but even in that if I click on a specific episode it gives me some other random episode.
I’ve gone through this process several times over the last few years each time hoping Plex updates would have fixed things but always seem to get the same results. It seems like others are able to successfully use Plex so I’m wondering what I’m doing wrong.
I’ve tried servers running on Linux (mostly Ubuntu Server), OSX and Windows. The media directory structure generally follows this pattern:
Show Title
Season 1
Show Title - SxEE - Episode Title.extension
So something like Firefly s01e04 would be
/Firefly/Season 1/Firefly - 1x04 - Jaynestown.mp4
I’d even be fine having Plex not try to figure out what shows are where and just let me browse by directory and select media files directly if I could get to the correct stuff that way.
I’m sure I’m missing something simple. Any thoughts on what I’m doing wrong?
A TV Show Library/
…Firefly/
…Season 01/
…Firefly - S01E04 - Jaynestown.mp4
It’s also possible that your MP4 files contain embedded metadata in the title field that is either bogus or simply wrong. Inspect these files for and remove bogus metadata or (more easily) move Local Media Assets to the bottom of the active Agent lists for Shows (and Movies as well) under all the categories: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200241558-Agents
In the case of Firefly if you’re irritated in that TVDB doesn’t list the episodes in the order they were intended use the DVD order agent: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/21141/dvd-order-agent/
(this only works reliably if you first have your episodes named and structured properly to begin with)
FileBot can instantly pre-match and rename all your Firefly episodes in seconds (link in my signature).
Typically Plex would like to have you not rename and restructure files while inside a working library, so the best time to rename/restructure would be before they hit the library. As such if you want to rename and restructure items with a high probability of success you’ll have to do the Plex Dance:
