Naming Convention - Movie Titles

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Player Version#:

Hi,

I’m uploading more movies to Plex Server and have read: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/

I’m using following naming convention:

Folder: Media/Movies/Movie-Name/
Movie: Movie-Name

  1. is there any benefit of using hypens in between the words of a movie name?
  2. is there any benefit of adding a Movie Year?
    a. Is it purely to help with a Match of the Movie, i.e. if multiple year releases? Any other benefits? as this can be fixed by the Fix/Match manual option…

Thanks

2

Did you not read the support article you linked?

A Movie Library/
...Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker (2019)/
......Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker (2019) [Info in Brackets is ignored].mkv

Do NOT add extra and unnecessary letters or punctuation.
Do NOT replace invalid filename characters with other valid characters - just leave them out.

If you expect Plex to find and match your media - you’d better follow the instructions. Your Plex career will go along much more smoothly.

If you don’t use FileBot, or similar, and are unsure about the proper name, go to database in question and find the proper name:

Leave the semicolon out.

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Step 1: Read documentation.
Step 2: Follow documentation.

Doing otherwise will, at some point, make your Plex experience more difficult.

  • Dashes, periods, underscores, etc do not help. At best, they do not harm, but why tempt fate?
  • The year helps with matching. It takes no extra time to add the year, especially if using s/w such as FileBot. Think of it as future proofing against remakes and movies with similar names.

Good post with details on how Plex matches things:

1 Like
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Hi @JuiceWSA,

thank you for this - I did read the documentation I sent in the link and it does not make reference to adding hypens as spaces / describing about the Year of the movie.

I’ll take your points onboard going forward.

5

Hi @FordGuy61, perfect! thank you for this!

Definitely no need to tempt fate!

1 Like
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Look at the examples. There are no brackets in the file names.

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FYI - see section on External Subtitle Files

It shows examples of where information in the square brackets are being used:

Subtitle files need to be named as follows:

  • MovieName (Release Date).[Language_Code].ext or
  • Movies/MovieName (Release Date).[Language_Code].ext
  • Movies/MovieName (Release Date).[Language_Code].forced.ext

Where [Language_Code] is defined by the ISO-639-1 (2-letter) or ISO-639-2/B (3-letter) standard.

Related Page : ISO-639-1 codes (2-letter)
Related Page : ISO-639-2/B codes (3-letter)

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Look at the examples. There are no brackets in the file names.

Edit: You’re showing syntax. Scroll down to examples. No brackets.

9

I see what you mean! :slight_smile:

/Movies
   Avatar (2009).mkv
   Avatar (2009).en.srt

so here, the movie name, followed by an additional subtitle file using “.en.” notation.

1 Like
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FYI, if you do put info in brackets, include that in the subtitle name as well. Plex is picky about that stuff.

Avatar (2009) [1080p].mkv
Avatar (2009) [1080p].en.srt

FYI2, wait until you get to TV shows. Plex is even pickier than with movies. :grimacing: Follow the guidelines exactly. It is sometimes a pain, but it pays off in the long run.

1 Like
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Indeed.

The Brackets are used if the file name needs to contain something not normally in a file name. Like a resolution, for instance:

Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker (2019) [1080p].mkv
Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker (2019) [1080p].eng.srt

… and yes, sub files need to look exactly like the media files they serve and need to be identified with a language.

1 Like
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