Ok so it seems that Plex is extremely sensitive to what and HOW you name your media. Why?
If I have a serie it’s VERY common to name the serie in the folder in this way:
Name of serie - S03E05 - Name of episode
Right?
but this way plex wont even FIND the file in the folder. The media will turn totally invisible for plex.
I have noticed that if I instead name the media:
5 Name of serie - Name of episode
The media then magically appears again.
Seriosly? Tell me I’m doing something wrong here.
I really want a detailed name of my media so I clearly see what season and episode it is.
Is it possible that you are trying to add “tv show”-content to a “movies”-type of library?
That doesn’t work.
You will have to separate the two types of content very strictly.
I recently went through this with my Television Series. I had to modify my naming convention. I created a folder for the Series for example Sons of Anarchy, then a folder per season for example Season 01, then modified the filename for the individual episodes to episode name - season & episode.file type for example The Revelator - s01e13.file type. Hope this helps, after I made this change all my episodes are showing up correctly.
Aha! Thanks! The folder in question containt both series and movies for my children… would be hard to divide them I think. But the type is “Other Videos”. Does that matter?
You will have to do it, if you want your series to appear and to work like series in Plex.
“Other Videos” is just a “Movies”-type of library with a special agent. It will still behave like a movie library and ignore all content that is named like a series.
Ah what a mess this is… Ok so I created its own SERIE-folder.
Put one serie in the folder just to try…
Names it SERIES NAME /// SEASON Number and year // and then named all series as SERIE S01E01 - Name of episodes
And inside plex it correctly find the serie! But it now have 4 seasons… Season 1 (one episode inside) and Season 2 (one episode inside) … and Season 2014 and Season 2016 with the rest of the episodes inside
What the hell?
And also, why dont they add the name of the episode inside Plex?
it just says “Episode 1”, “Episode 2” etc… but the file containts the correct episode name!
Yes I did remove the year (but comeone, why cant I just have the information I want?)
But inside plex it still show the old info… doesnt seem to update correctly?
If Plex has a “mis-match”, you sometimes have to convince it to actually clear that mismatch from its database.
The procedure is called the Plex Dance.
btw. Plex is not using the episode title from the file name. It will solely go by season and episode number and look up the title in TheMovieDB.org
So your files better use the identical numbering and ordering as they use on TheMovieDB.org (or optionally the one on TheTVDB.com)
You can. Of course, it will be a long slow process.
In my experience, Plex doesn’t give a damn about a lot of the things they request you name your series after. For the series itself, it seems it ONLY cares about the name of the show’s root folder. You make a library pointing to the BOLD text below:
//Media/TV Shows/The Simpsons (1989)/
Then create a folder, such as I did above for The Simpsons (1989) (include the release year as seen on TheTVDB/TMDB), and dump your files for the show in there.
Next, the files themselves. The very least you need for Plex to recognize a file is JUST the “SxxExx.ext” format. For example, you can name all your files Season/Episode S01E15.ext, or the year/episode (for shows like SNL that don’t count seasons by number, but by the current year) S2021E135.ext. EVERYTHING else in the filename is ignored. Including the series name, and the episode name. At this point, Plex has enough info to go to an external site (TheTVDB or TheMovieDB) and retrieve all the metadata it needs. It gets the episode name, description, release date, genre, actors, etc.
I doubt you’ll find anyone here that will recommend you name the files this simply. I don’t myself. I include the episode name after the season/episode pairing S01E01 - Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, mostly so if I use this media in another service or player I know the name of the episode. And I can determine which show it belongs to by the folder it is within.
EDIT: All of the above only applies to a TV Show library. If you use the generic “Other Videos” library, as stated above Plex ignores the files that have “SxxExx” format, but even if it didn’t it would not retrieve any metadata automatically from external sites.
You don’t have to be super strict with the naming setup - there is some wiggle room - but the more strict you keep to it the more likely you’ll avoid matching\naming hiccups.
For what you’re describing with the kids videos… you might break those out into dedicated libraries - so you can have a general “TV Shows” library and a “Kids TV Shows” library. Same with Movies. There’s lots of flexibility for other options to separate out kids stuff from the rest (dig around these forums a bit for options) but the start of all of it is getting your files recognized and matched by Plex and that means getting files in order. Once it clicks for you though… it’ll feel more intuitive.
Thank you! I have some shows that wont show up on the internet TVDB/MDB and the reason I want the episodes name is because for my children its easier to see what the show is about. Like for example there is a show showing diffrent jobs… like police, firefighter etc etc…
And if all they see is “Episode1” … “Episode 2” it will my my life harder when my kid say he want to see the one about firefighter and there is 24 episodes with diffrent jobs.
But my own series… no reason at all to have the episode name of course! All I’m saying is that there could be reasons I want the episode name to show… and how hard could it be to just choose what serie I want it that way?
Anyway…I’ll live
But now I now how Plex want me to name my files. Thanks!
