For some movies I can get away with putting a movie sequence number in the file name but not with others.
Just wondering if there are some tricks to make this work so that the file name when managing files leaves the movie in sequence.
For example these ones don’t work:
Ant-Man 1.mkv
Ant-Man 1 (2015).mkv
But all of these do:
Ant-Man 2.mkv
Ant-Man 2 - And The Wasp.mkv
Avengers 1.mkv
Avengers 2.mkv
Avengers 2 - Age of Ultron.mkv
I noticed that as a contributor to TMDB that you can add an alternate title to a movie and maybe this is why some of them work … for instance Ant-Man 2 is added as an alternate title to TMDB. So I tried adding Ant-Man 1 as an alternate title to TMDB but it doesn’t work … maybe a caching period … separate post on that general question.
If you name the movies exactly correctly (or even pretty close) you will have very few problems. Most movie series can simply be named like :
Ant-Man (2015)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Then you can use the sort field like:
Ant-Man 2015
Ant-Man 2018
to sort the movies together.
For movie series like “Star Wars” where the best viewing order is not the release order you can use "Star Wars 010.00 for “The Phantom Menace” and so on throughout the series. The reason I have extra digits in that is so, if they release a movie that fits between existing movies, the extra digits allow the “new” movie to be sorted between the correct movies. ex for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” the sort field might be:
“Star Wars 03.5” as the move belongs between Episode 3 and Episode 4.
That all is to say do not change the name of the movie to get them sorted correctly but rather use the sort field to get the movies you want together.
Thanks I use the sort field within the library, but when I am dealing with the file system I would prefer to see the files in order there as well as I spend a bunch of time managing movie files (additions, udpates, etc.)
That is what sub-directories are for. All my Star Wars movies are in a directory called “Star Wars Movies” so I can easily access them. I have found that messing with the actual name just leads to problems. The file system is not sorted “correctly” but there are a limited number of movies in a specific sub-directory.
You can do as you please, obviously, but if you mess with the file names then Plex, or any other media manager, may have problems.
Plex is very good at matching bad naming but it is not guaranteed and it is not guaranteed that movies that are matched today will not fail to match tomorrow.
It is best not to try and fight the Great Plexosaurus as that only leads to problems and can have your files inside Plex looking like Tokyo after a three day visit from a certain large lizard.
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Thanks, this works great. I have found that for some basic cases like the first movie in a series (Ant-Man 1, Frozen 1, etc.) that if I add an alternate title in the TMDB for that movie after a 24hr (approx) time period, the movie can be named without the IMDB tag … but to the point from others, what works today may not work tomorrow). But many movies have that tag added and contributors call it a “working title”
