This would help me greatly, especially if we can get this functionality applied to TV shows, as well. I have a multi-part-per episode TV show that matches just fine, but trying to select which “version” of the episode I want to watch is baffling, since they are all the same format and bitrate. Just having the filenames would be enough for me.
I’m not exactly sure this is about this particular feature suggestion… could you share an example? It sounds like you’re referring at a single episode being distributed across multiple files or 1 file containing multiple episodes – which can already be done and is a little different than what this suggestion is about.
What is the TV show and how are the parts different?
I’m trying to get the original 1963 Doctor Who series to play nice with either of the agents available. Each episode I have is named similarly to “Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (1) - Four Hundred Dawns”. I realize that this is not the standard naming system, but renaming each episode to individually fit The TV Database’s numbering system has proven insanely time consuming. I decided to try and put them all back to the original naming system, which works great with The Movie Database’s numbering (Doctor Who: Season 3 (1965) — The Movie Database (TMDb)), as long as it’s up to Season Five or Six. In this case, the episodes and any bonus material are collected together in “parts” associated with that “episode”, assuming that they can be selected uniquely (at the moment, they cannot). Past Season Five, the agent seems to have a different way of numbering the episodes, which is an issue that has no bearing on Plex as far as I see it.
So to make it more clear, each “episode” is a story arc that airs over multiple days and therefore has a file per day, representing a “part” of that “episode”.
Honestly it’s very confusing to my simple mind and so if anyone has a resource they know of that they can direct me to that would help a bunch, as trying to apply the Naming Guide (Naming and Organizing Your TV Show Files | Plex Support) to this show for either of the available agents has proved frustrating.
This may be the wrong venue for this particular issue, though I do still think it’d be great to have clearer delineation between versions in the “Play Version” modal.
What is “(018)” and “Galaxy 4 (1)” trying to indicate or keep track of?
Also when renaming large groups of files, I have found the Bulk Rename Utility to be a handy tool.
I’ve moved this into a separate thread as it got nothing to do with the feature suggestion thread you were posting in.
@BornYesterday : please don’t cross-post or try to hijack other threads!
As for the issue at hand…
Would you mind sharing a full example of how those files are structured and named (not just the snippet from above) – preferably including the folder structure from the folder to which your library is pointing. Plex works best if you drop all unnecessary bells and whistles…
Naming the files like this should work:
TV Shows <- the folder linked to your tv-show library
Doctor Who
Season 03
Doctor Who - s03e01 - Four Hundred Dawns.ext
Doctor Who - s03e02 - Trap of Steel.ext
Doctor Who - s03e03 - Air Lock.ext
Doctor Who - s03e04 - The Exploding Planet.ext
Where .ext is the respective file extension.
To be fair… even the episode title is completely optional. For what it’s worth you can go simply with episode names like Doctor Who - s03e01.ext.
If your files are organized by “arcs” instead of individual episodes, you need to name them accordingly. Plex is able to deal with 1 file covering multiple episodes.
Example:
TV Shows <- the folder linked to your tv-show library
Doctor Who
Season 03
Doctor Who - s03e01-e04 - Galaxy 4.ext
Apologies, I didn’t quite explain that quite thoroughly enough. I’ll Try to break down the naming system based off of that episode that we’re discussing:
Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (1) - Four Hundred Dawns
Doctor Who - Series Name
S03E01 - Episode Number 1 from the perspective of Season 3
(018) - Episode Number 18 from the perspective of the entire series
Galaxy 4 - “Episode” (or story arc) Name
(1) - Part Number, from the perspective of the “Episode” or story arc
Four Hundred Dawns - “Part” Name
This is obviously not how the naming guide tells us to do it, but this system can be very helpful to me since there are over a thousand individual files in my collection for this show. As I’ve mentioned before, this system allows Plex to get the appropriate metadata for the files and organize them properly, even without renaming them to fit the guide’s system, as long as the agent organizes them by the “Episode” number and not attempting to make each “Part” an episode, as understood by Plex. Doctor Who appears to me to use an unusual serialization system, as is evident from the fact that The Movie DB and The TV DB disagree on how to determine what an “episode” is, and that seems to be the root of my issue with this series.
However, I have found that the solution at which I have currently arrived is getting me about 90% of the way there. As long as I use The TV DB’s naming system, my “Parts” are all binned together under the heading of one “Episode” (again, including any bonus intro/outro materials, which really works well when the extra materials are, as in this case, tied specifically to an episode). The only obstacle to this working fully for me is my inability to use the “Play Version” functionality to distinguish one “Part” from another within a given “Episode”.
I appreciate your suggestion of the Bulk Rename Utility. I have seen it suggested in most topics like this that arise, and I have seen many of them. I have tried the Bulk Rename Utility to solve this particular problem and have found that it wasn’t quite what I was looking for, both in the sense that the naming system I am using already appears to work the way I want it to (assuming this feature request were implemented) and also in the sense that I don’t think this can be solved without a lookup table renaming each file, at which point I might as well rename each of my over one thousand files by hand. If I am missing something important, please do let me know.
Thanks @tom80H, I wasn’t intending to hijack another thread, I was simply trying to answer questions posed to me in response to my original post, which I imagine should have been on topic to the best of my knowledge.
Regardless, I agree this can be considered a separate issue unrelated to the original post. Thank you for moving it out somewhere that it is more appropriate.
As will likely be evident here, the naming system I have is closer to the former one you posted, but the SXEX format is closer to SXEXPX:
/TV Shows/
/Doctor Who/
/Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 - Parts 1-4/
/Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (0) - Intro by Peter Purves.avi
/Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (1) - Four Hundred Dawns (Recon).avi
/Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (2) - Trap of Steel (Recon).avi
/Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (3) - Air Lock (Recon).avi
/Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (4) - The Exploding Planet (Recon).avi
/Doctor Who - S03E01 (018) - Galaxy 4 (5) - Outro by Peter Purves.avi
If there is a way to use Bulk File Rename to rename these to the standard SXEX format which TheMovieDB uses, I would be interested to know how to use it in that way, but I have not yet found anything that explains how to do so.
Your mistake is to try mixing your story arcs with the level where Plex expects the season folder.
Go with the official naming – personally I’d go one step further and assign the intro/outro as local extras to avoid completely confusing Plex. Those local extras might not show immediately but will be supported with the future Plex tv-show agent!
TV Shows
Doctor Who
Season 03
Doctor Who - s03e01 - Galaxy 4 (1) - Four Hundred Dawns.avi
Doctor Who - s03e02 - Galaxy 4 (2) - Trap of Steel.avi
Doctor Who - s03e03 - Galaxy 4 (3) - Air Lock.avi
Doctor Who - s03e04 - Galaxy 4 (4) - The Exploding Planet.avi
Doctor Who - s03e05 - Mission to the Unknown.avi
Doctor Who - s03e06 - The Myth Makers (1) - Temple of Secrets.avi
Doctor Who - s03e07 - The Myth Makers (2) - Small Prophet, Quick Return.avi
Doctor Who - s03e08 - The Myth Makers (3) - Death of a Spy.avi
Doctor Who - s03e09 - The Myth Makers (4) - Horse of Destruction.avi
Interviews
18. "Galaxy 4" Intro by Peter Purves.avi
18. "Galaxy 4" Outro by Peter Purves.avi
I slightly adapted the optional episode title to allow subsequent identification of the story arcs in your file explorer. Keep in mind – Plex does not deal with those story arcs!!
I’ve double-checked. There’s also no alternative order where the episodes are grouped by story arc
Edit:
I’ve amended the example to include episodes beyond the “Galaxy 4” story arc. I hope that makes the structure a bit more clear.
Thanks, your structure is clear, and I understand that this is compatible with the guide, but I am interested in how I would expand this solution to all thousand plus files that I have in my collection. I have tried this solution on a smaller subset of my files by hand-renaming them and it worked great, but I don’t see a way other than spending several hours trying to go through each season and renaming them, even with a bulk file renaming tool, since there is no straightforward way of predicting how many parts are in an episode. I see the Bulk Rename Utility used a lot, but is there a way to use it for this purpose?
I don’t think you can. Especially because those story arcs are not documented in any of the online repositories used by Plex.
That’s my concern, and why my solution is intended to take advantage of Plex’s “Play Version” functionality, if only the “Play Version” functionality allowed for the files in the modal to be differentiated. This is why I believed that this topic would go best where I had put it.
But they’re not different versions, are they? Those are actual individual episodes 
Haha, I suppose that’s so. Still, I would also like the ability to distinguish between “Director’s Cut” and “Theatrical” versions of a given film, as discussed in the original thread. If the filename is used as a way to distinguish the files themselves, then the solution that I’ve cobbled together should work. My alternative, as far as I see it, is to spend many hours hand-renaming or using a LUT to do essentially the same thing, which I would rather avoid. Again, I’m sure I’m missing something-- Do you know of a better solution?
As for the different cuts/editions… that’s really all in the thread where you originally cross-posted.
There’s workarounds and ways how to deal with them – but no “nicely integrated” one.
Examples are:
- let Plex match the files and identify them as duplicates, then split them from within Plex (which creates 2 independent items… you can then manually include the applicable edition name to the item title or adjust the posters)
- move the alternative versions into a separate library
The existing “version” handling is only addressing different quality versions of the same video (e.g. 1080p vs. 4K versions of the same cut).
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I see. Thanks very much for consolidating all of that!
The nice thing about naming them as Plex expects, with the official seasons and SxxEyy filenames, is that Plex will get the episode names, descriptions, and airdates and other metadata.
The episode titles on TVDB include (N) so it’s at least possible to identify that an episode belongs to a multi-episode story arc.
If you figured out a way to hack/stack them, you’d be losing much of that. :-/
Sure, I understand, and in most cases naming them as Plex expects would work fine. In this case, however, I have a large filebase that will need to be renamed, and the way that they are broken up filewise does not match in a predictable way to the way they are named in the databases available to Plex. My initial statement that I posted waaay at the top there was in the interest of something that would allow me not to spend the prohibitive time and effort necessary to rename each file by hand. I understand the basic premise that I should rename all of these files, but there are over one thousand here which will need to be renamed by hand unless there is a way to batch them that I am unaware of. As @tom80H and I discussed in posts 10 and 11 of this thread, this does not appear to be something that can be done with Bulk Rename Utility as a result of the way that these files are named in TheTVDB and TheMovieDB.
I don’t have a problem with renaming them to the standard format, but if there is no practical way to do so, then I’m not sure how to resolve the issue.
Are you aware of a way to use the Bulk Rename Utility to rename the file structure that I have posted to the file structure reflected in @tom80H s post, or are you suggesting that I manually rename a thousand files?
Get 32 close friends together, each of you rename 32 files, and you’ll be done in no time!
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Both FileBot and tinyMediaManager have some features to help match filenames against episodes. I’m not sure if either of them will work for your current file names, but it’s certainly worth checking.
I’m optimistic because you have episode numbers in a consistent place in each filename.
But that might still require you to go season-by-season. :-/
Haha, yeah, ultimately that’s the only other solution. Oh well, in life some problems aren’t solved instantly. Thank you both for attempting to help, it’s great to see how quick to respond and interactive you all are. I’ll definitely be posting again if I encounter any other issues!
