Name incosistency for TV Media files

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#:4.30.2
Player Version#:Fire TV
Catch 22 - a six episode TV Media series.
My names for this content are:
Catch 22 - 1x01 - Episode 1
Catch 22 - 1x02 - Episode 2
Catch 22 - 1x03 - Episode 3
etc.

Plex shows the content as Forever (2014) which is some ABC series that I do not have access to.

What did I do wrong with the naming or ??

2
3

I am still bamboozled


My content is separated into Movies and TV Media directories. I have other TV content that is properly treated and presented.

I went to the TVDB and looked up the show. “Catch-22” is the name presented

Names I am using are:
Catch-22 - 1x01 - Episode 1 (2019).mp4
Catch-22 - 1x02 - Episode 2 (2019).mp4
Catch-22 - 1x03 - Episode 3 (2019).mp4strong text
Catch-22 - 1x04 - Episode 4 (2019).mp4
Catch-22 - 1x05 - Episode 5 (2019).mp4
Catch-22 - 1x06 - Episode 6 (2019).mp4

I deleted the files from the TV Media area and saw them removed from the listing of TV Shows.
Emptied trash

Copied the material back to the TV Media area
Saw PLEX start to add a Catch 22 icon and then after about 15 seconds it changed to Forever (2014)

I believe the names I have chosen follow the guidelines but the TVDB match is wrong.

How do I force PLEX to the correct area. If I have named these incorrectly please provide a recommended ‘new’ name.

4

Naming should look like this:

TV Shows    <- the folder linked to that Plex tv-show library
   Catch-22
      Season 01
         Catch-22 - s01e01 - Episode 1.mp4
         Catch-22 - s01e02.mp4   <- the episode title is optional and will be ignored by Plex... so you can drop it
         Catch-22 - s01e03.mp4
         ...

I haven’t tested it myself
 you might need to include the year in those file names to distinguish it from the 1970 version of that show.
Example: TV Shows > Catch-22 (2019) > Season 01 > Catch-22 (2019) - s01e01 - Episode 1.mp4

With mp4 files there’s another possible obstacle. If those files have embedded metadata and you have Local Media Assets enabled and prioritized over the other (online) sources, Plex will use the embedded title to match the show.

5

Thank you Tom80H – you have been generous with your time to respond.

I believe I have determined the issue. It may be an underlying issue that developers might want to consider but probably not worthwhile.

Prior to this morning I had all TV Media .mp4 files organized in the \TV Media\ directory/

Picture hundreds of files with many content titles all individually named in the same directory.

Based on a hunch I decided to reorganize them into sub directories related to the content title i.e. “Game of Thrones”, “Longmire”, Handmaid’s Tale" and so on.

Instead of hundreds of files in one directory there are now 14 sub directories and media content in those directories.

When I did that – created a “Catch-22” sub directory and then moved the content to that sub directory PLEX ran around and found the correct associations from TVDB

If I would make one comment, I believe that the documentation should make it clear that sub directories by content title are required. The current documentation was silent on that matter and I just followed along with my prior practice instead of taking the time to reorganize my content.

Now that has better organization life is better and i ‘fool feelish’ for waiting this long to do the reorganization.

Thanks for those who helped.

6

See the link posted above by Coxerino:

It is important that both the folder structure and each episode filename be correct for shows to be correctly matched.

Most television shows have episodes organized into seasons. To name season-based shows create files with the season and episode notation SXXEXX

  • /TV Shows/ShowName/Season 02/ShowName – s02e17 – Optional_Info.ext
7

I couldn’t get this way (using Season XX) to separate the seasons of the shows. If I did it that way Plex thought all the shows were called Season 01, etc
 the actual names could not be found by a search. I ended up having to dump all the seasons into the folder named for the series. ie. All episodes of the seasons of "Bosch’ in the one folder. Then I had to add each series folder at a time. It’s like PMS doesn’t know how to drill down into folders to find the shows. I’m running PMS on a Windows 10 machine using a Drobo NAS to hold the files.

8

In that case you must have something else in your setup that’s seriously messed up.

Just to give you a perfectly working example (using “Bosch” as you just mentioned it):

TV Shows   <- this is the folder linked to your Plex tv-shows library
   Bosch
      Season 01
         Bosch - s01e01 - Tis the Season.ext
         Bosch - s01e02.ext   <- works as well as Plex ignores the text after the sXXeYY pattern
         Bosch - s01e03.ext
         ...
         Bosch - s01e10.ext

      Season 02
         Bosch - s02e01.ext
         Bosch - s02e02.ext
         ...

Where .ext is the file extension

Important:
Do not add every single series/show folder individually to your Plex library. THAT will get things seriously messed up!

1 Like
9

Nope, tried all sorts of variations. Saw that some people that provided examples where “TV Shows” was just “TV”, tried that. Originally I didn’t have the hyphen after the “Bosch”, added that everywhere. No difference. Some examples had lower-case “se01e01”, tried it. No Joy. My folder structure looks like:
Y:\Media\TV
\TV Series A
\Alias
Alias - S01E01 - Truth Be Told

etc

\All in the Family
All in the Family - S01E01 - Meet the Bunkers

etc


It got even crazier down at:
\TV Series V
\Veep
Veep - S01E01 - Fundraiser

 etc.

It added these as the Show “V” that “visitors/ alien invaders” show complete with flying saucer picture.

Between the attempts where I would change names, add hyphens, etc. I would delete the libraries, Scan Library Files, Empty Trash, Clean Bundles. Then stop and start PMS.
Doing an +Add Library, TV Shows, Entering the Name of the Series (such as entering “Chuck” overwriting “TV Shows”) and then Browse to the Y:\Media\TV\TV Series C\Chuck
is the only way I could get this work.

10

There’s no need for the “TV Shows” folder in my example to be named “TV Shows” – could be called pretty much everything that’s allowed by your operating system.

With your example
 I take it you have Y:\Media\TV\TV Series A\ as the folder linked to your Plex library (TV Series B, ... C, ...D
 ... Z respectively). Plex doesn’t like missing folder levels to its schema – nor additional ones – so if you linked Y:\Media\TV\, this will create a lot of mismatches.

PS: Generally speaking you might be better off not following all kinds of wild ideas from the internet but have a look at the support article describing exactly how tv shows should be structured, files named etc.

11

Yeah, I looked at those. One of the Plex documents says to name the files like TVDB 
 but when I looked there I saw all kinds of information about the shows 
 but not how they were to be named.

But you’re saying that if were to get rid of the “TV Series A”, “TV Series B”, etc. structure this might have worked?

12

he is saying that in the library setup if you have those folders then you need to add them here like so. You do not add the individual show folders there.

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 11.37.29 AM
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13

Plex is very, very picky with TV show naming & structure.

Use the naming and structure exactly as shown in the documentation.

You can use “TV Series A” etc if you follow BigWheel’s example.

Also, you need season subfolders for each show.

/Alias
  /Season 01
    /Alias - s01e01.ext
14

I started this thread with my original question. My issue got solved with the help of tom80H

I offered my humble opinion that the PLEX documentation for naming was not fulsome – not wrong per se but apparently alternatives that will work equally well and possibly have more clarity for the user (viewer) of the media.

And then I chased down a program called FileBot – that program provided a ‘list’ of names to use for various series. The list was close to the recommendations in the PLEX documentation but did differ is several ways. There was no use of the ‘season’ or ‘episode’ nomenclature.

I have used the FileBot approach and with the exception of directory organization screwup on my part it seems to work.

Documentation is often elusive – what is perfectly clear to one person is unclear to another – thus the need for proof readers and user input. That said, there have been comments along the line that “ PLEX is sensitive to 
” Those comments undoubtably have to do with the complexity of the code, the plurality of data bases, etc.

I sure do not want to get into trouble but if anyone is interested, I will provide my version of the naming approach document. For this to work I would need to communicate with the technical folks who can answer a variety of question I have.

No flames please.

15

they don’t work equally well, that’s often why folks come here to ask why X is not doing what they expect

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