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.
