There’s an old thread on here discussing issues with Looney Tunes Golden Collection meta data - the discussion is closed so I thought I’d place my findings here.
Rather than import the videos as a TV show and go through the painstaking task of re-naming each video (as suggested in the original post), I discovered each episode is recognized as a short film. If you import them as films, all the metadata should appear fine. The one problem with this, is that you’ll now have some 300+ films floating around your Film section. The way I approached it was to create a new Library (called Looney Tunes, with type set to ‘Movies’), and have that watch your Looney Tunes folder. Make sure this folder is stored outside of your standard Movies folder so they don’t get pulled in there too.
And there you have it! All your Looney Tunes cartoons in one convenient place, complete with metadata. If you set the filter to ‘Folders’, it will organize them by disk. Hope this helps
adrian.macleod’s solution is the best answer to the Looney Tunes problem for people who haven’t renamed everything for TVDB.
I’d previously tried adding as a TV show, but this requires extensive renaming for TVDB compliance. There are 375 files here so this was too labor intensive for me. If you don’t rename, almost everything will be wrong.
I then tried using as Home Videos, but then you don’t get the nice, neat naming and posters.
A separate movies library is clearly the best solution (and as an aside, OF COURSE they should be movies…these won Academy Awards…can’t believe we’ve all been trying to stick these under TV for years). You still will need to split apart a dozen or so files, and fix matches for about 30-50 files, but you can do this in an hour or two while multi-tasking. When cleaning up the mismatches, I suggest switching Plex to list view and then sorting by year to find a lot of the mismatches; then I suggest switching back to grid view and looking for things that don’t have Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies posters. A lot of the episode names are puns on films of the era, and a lot of the episode names are very similar to one another, so the Plex engine mismatches frequently – but typically the second suggestion under “fix match” is the right one.
So thank you adrian. It was so great to be able to flip on Plex last night and quickly find the episode I wanted to watch.
I must be doing something wrong here. I just imported Volume 1 Disc 1 via MKV and did as the post suggests: Created a Movie-type library named Looney Tunes and pointed it to the Looney Tunes folder. All Plex did was import the videos with the titles that MKV gave them. I then tried manually adding the episode title to the end of the file name. This worked for 2 of the 14 episodes (E2 and E14) but the others aren’t getting matches. I tried to pick a match but even then I wasn’t able to find a match in the list Plex provided for all the episodes. Any suggestions? File name example: LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION DISC 1_t07 Rabbit’s Kin
I’m in the same boat @photoblaster. I don’t know what the issue is but when trying to make a Movie library and and adding the Looney Tunes folder to it, it fails to add any proper metadata to any of the files. I’m able to manually Match them, but it kind of defeats the purpose of having Plex do it for me. Is there a specific file structure/naming convention people are using to make this automatically match the files?
Same as @photoblaster and @Gorlath. I’m running into the same problem. No MetaData. As default the agent is The Movie Database. Should I be trying something else? Anything with the naming convention?
I ended up doing exactly what @imagoodusername suggested. I also did the additional step of each cartoon is its own file. all have embedded meta data including the poster. many of which I actually made myself because I could not find a movie poster for many of the cartoons. where I was able to find a movie poster I used that
I currently keep them in a Movie library and when i first loaded them I needed to suggest to Plex for some use the local assets data. I know how long it took me from extracting the files finding the meta data from many sources , imdb, tvdb, and a few others like wikipedia collecting the images. all of it was not fun but I am happy with my results. one of these days I will be creating a seperate library for them after i get rid of my old apple tv’s and the need to run both Plex and itunes and keep the library structure that works for both.
So for Rabbit’s Kin, here’s my folder structure:
/LooneyTunes/Volume 1/Disc 1 - Best of Bugs Bunny/07 - Rabbit’s Kin.avi
I think the key is to strip out the “LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION DISC1_t07”. Just try ripping the files with the file naming format of name.mkv (e.g. Rabbit’s Kin.mkv).
I’ve been entering all classic cartoon shorts this way, using the shorts title (“Wackiki Wabit (1943).mp4”) , but keeping them in separate file folders (all looney tunes in one folder), just adding the folders to my MOVIES tab one by one. In the case of larger shorts collections like Loony Tunes I would add 12 or so shorts at a time (copying into a Loony Tunes folder in my media directory, with the PLEX MOVIE tab directed to it as a second “watch” folder) so they would display easily on the PLEX home page under the “Newly Added Movies” tab.
Once added, I use the “Collections” tags to group them all together so they don’t interfere/sprawl out my main collection. So I have a “Disney” collection, “Looney Tunes”, etc. Using the collections tags, I can also connect them to actual TV series, where applicable.
Another idea, for those trying to tame their shorts. A little more time consuming, but it looks pretty.
BradBart948 - Did you use a table to help you convert / rename the episodes like taking the tvdb listing and translate the DVD rip? I’m looking to follow your steps as a TV series, but also looking for an easy(er) renaming map if others have done so. If not, I guess I’ll be building out an Excel worksheet that can map the 543 names so I can run Renamer or FileBot to change them. Thoughts? Can you share an example of your path & file naming scheme?
I actually used thetvdb.com to determine the year/episode # for a given title, and then used an old program called wdtvhubgen (which I mentioned in this post) to name the file.
Wdtvhubgen is a program I used to name files and gather metadata for my wdtv boxes years ago. Still use it religiously for naming movie and TV show files. The movie poster art is low res though, so I have to select a higher res version from the Plex edit screen, or elsewhere.
Opening the file in wdtvhubgen select the Manually Search for Title menu option.
I know going into this that the Looney Tunes video title is Operation: Rabbit. A little searching on thetvdb.com reveals this is season 1952, episode 2 so I enter those values in the manual search box.
The episode metadata is then displayed, and you have the option to save, or start over. Saving renames the file, creates an xml metadata file (not much use with Plex) and an episode poster.
That’s great! Thanks for the extra mile to do a great process write-up! This totally fills in the blanks I was asking — you did an exceptional job to make this library look fantastic. Cheers! -M@
I’m renamed all my 244 looney tunes episodes manually to the tvdb naming convention but less than 30 are classified as Looney Tunes. The rest are classified as The Looney Tunes Show, which was that newer animated version from the last decade. How is this possible, and is there any way I can correct this?
At first I had the Golden Collections in their own sub-folders like this:
Media\TV Shows\Looney Tunes\Looney Tunes Golden Collection - Disk 1\LooneyTunes - s1935e20 - EpisodeName (golden collection disk number).
I created a backup of this folder since it was time consuming and now have:
Media\TV Shows\Looney Tunes\Looney Tunes - s1935e20 - EpisodeName and I tried with and without leaving the golden collection episode number at the end in parenthesis and removing it completely.
