Maintain movie series order while adhering to plex naming convention?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#: 1.26.2.5797

I’d like to structure my movie series’ such that they maintain correct movie order in their respective directories.

e.g.

/The Before Trilogy
… / 1. Before Sunrise (1995)
… / […files]
… / 2. Before Sunset (2004)
… / […files]
… / 3. Before Midnight (2013)
… / […files]

Naming it in this way allows me to maintain movie order on my hard drive but in Plex it often causes the scanner agent to include the number (i.e. 1, 2, or 3) in the movie title, and so I lose important metadata as it’s treated like an unknown video.

i.e. there’s no movie called “1 Before Sunrise” but there is “Before Sunrise”

How can I maintain movie ordering on my hard drive without affecting Plex agent? Perhaps a setting in plex or a better naming convention?

Thanks

2

You can add a Sort Title to them. or put those movies in a collection and order them however you want.

sorry i misunderstood your question

3

are they MP4 files with embedded metadata or is that just the file name

4

That’s just the file name.
Can be any video container (mkv, mp4, avi, etc.)

5

Though I don’t really recommend it and it does not follow official naming convention. There was another user I know puts the year first in parenthesis and seemed to be working fine for them.

6

Include the IMDB ID in the file name and that might help?

7

I’m pretty sure even without Plex they want when ordered by title on their filesystem to ordered in release order. Else “Before Midnight (2013)” would show up first in file system in the trilogy folder.

Could manually match after scanning them in but I get that may be a lot of work depending on how many of these groups they have.

8

Yeah, I’ve got a lot of collections like this so manually finding the metadata would be quite tedious.
I’ll try renaming a collection with the year at the front and see if Plex can successfully identify the movie.

Re: IMDB ID - Are you saying that adding the ID to the title will allow plex to identify the movie regardless of whether I have a number at the beginning (e.g. “3. Before Midnight (2013 [tt2209418]”)?

9

Yes. If you supply a valid ID it makes the folder name completely irrelevant.

Better look up the officially supported syntax: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files#toc-0
You can also use IDs from TheMovieDB.org, not just those from IMDb.com

And there is another trick which could benefit your use case:
The content of the first pair of square brackets in the folder/file names is ignored during matching. So you could do something like this:

/The Before Trilogy
… / [1] Before Sunrise (1995) - {imdb-tt0112471}
   … 
… / [2] Before Sunset (2004) - {imdb-tt0381681}
   … 
… / [3] Before Midnight (2013) - {imdb-tt2209418}
   …

without fearing that the numbers at the beginning could disturb the matching process.

1 Like
10

Thanks, using square brackets did the trick!

1 Like
11

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