I have a tv show where I hand edited all files with the correct season and episode number.
Each filename also includes the title of that episode, and I’d like Plex to use these episode names. Curious to know how I might do that.
Plex does not read the data from NFO files. There is a 3rd party agent that can do it, but it is not a native Plex feature.
If those are MP4 files, PMS will read the “title” field from the embedded metadata in the file. For example in Windows, you can see and edit this value straight from the File Explorer. There are other metadata editors that can also set this value.
That’s right they are mp4 files. Is there a batch process/program that can update the metadata?
None that I am aware of personally.
If the file names already contain the season and episode numbers (as per the naming guidelines for Plex), then it is relatively easy to take them from there and put them into the meta tags.
I use mp3tag for this kind of thing.
It has a feature called “Convert: Filename → Tag”
You instruct it with some patterns on what to look for.
For instance, the string %tvshow% - s%tvseason%e%tvepisode% - %title% will transform the correctly formatted file name Arrow - s01e08 - Vendetta.mp4
into metatags thusly:
Alternatively, you can replace all tags which shall not be set with just %dummy%. In this example, only the %title% is useful for Plex. So you could use %dummy% - s%dummy%e%dummy% - %title% instead.
mp3tag is available on Windows and Mac, and can be executed on Linux using Wine.
The other way around is also possible. It can also transform filenames to differently formatted filenames etc.
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Thanks. This is super helpful. In fact I have mp3tage already, didn’t know it could do this.
Here’s an example of my titles. I uploaded a bunch of Charlie Rose Episodes. Some go like this:
S02E249 Henry Kissinger 09171992
I would like to make the name “Henry Kissinger” show up in the Plex title. Is there a way to parse this?
You just need to take the above example and reorder it a bit.
mp3tag will show you “live” if it works or not, like in the above screenshot.
I assume something like
s%dummy%e%dummy% %title% %dummy%
should extract the title while ignoring the rest.
Having done this to my archive of videos, it seems as though changing the metatags alone did not trigger Plex to make the title change I’m looking for. I don’t have accompanying nfo files for the videos. Perhaps there is something I’m missing here?
You need to to:
- tell Plex to actually use your embedded metadata by enabling “Prefer local metadata” in the properties of the library
- “Refresh Metadata” on the affected show
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