Hi. sorry, tried to search but cant find thread with this issue.
Prior to about 18 months ago, plex would properly match and import files named “series name, the - s01e01.mp4.” Now I’m forced to name files “The series name - s01e01.mp4” which s not proper English or standard file sorting naming.
I thought this was an accident and would be fixed eventually. After this long, I guess that programmer types have purposely decided to forgo proper English on purpose.
Does anyone know why they did this? is there any hope at all that they will return to sanity and allow properly named files?”
Plex obviously allows proper sorting within the app, why not within my file system?
For reliable matching, Plex expects the filename to be the movie title, not a rearranged version of the title or a “sort” title with added commas.
Plex supports quite a few languages, with differing rules about articles and sorting. For reliability, “use the movie title” is a nice consistent rule. It’s also what the metadata providers expect.
I don’t think it’s helpful to blame Plex. Plex fetches and uses a “sort” title for display. I would hazard a guess that you rename files because your file explorer doesn’t offer a “title sort” function.
I’m a little bit surprised to hear matching is so bad for you. Even if you have to Match or Fix Match occasionally, I would expect things to mostly work OK.
Plex recently added support for putting IMDB IDs in filenames for Movie libraries. I think we can expect that same functionality for TV shows, “soon”, when the updated TV scanner arrives. Those IDs provide a very strong match, and will probably let you do what you want, when the update arrives for TV shows.
See the example of an “IMDB id number” in this document:
I just saw a good comment about how to think about articles and sorting: You would put Title, The in an index or a printed lookup table, not on the sign outside a store, the spine of a book, title page of a book, or at the top of a sheet of music.
“The”, and “A”, “An”, are the obvious examples. What about “Some”, “Any”?
@trumpy81 - I’m always up for a good language history fact. I would have guessed that article-stripping for sorting was almost as old as “The” itself. I tried to Google for more, but it’s impossible to search for “The”.
The only real “point” of my rant is that this functionality used to work and now it doesn’t. Someone had to purposely remove perfectly good code that wasn’t hurting anyone but definitely helped some folks.
I actually do use the tt1234455 code in my movie naming with limited success.
I use the gnu file manager and don’t see any option to display a proper sort order for my files outside of plex. Which file managers allow this?
I’ve got about 40TB of distros on my server so with that hundred thousands of files I don’t know how a person could remember which files start with an article. It just seems like madness that people keep track of that themselves.
Going back to the original post - do you find that NOTHING matches with the articles moved?
I did some testing and found that it generally worked pretty OK, even with articles moved.
I’m almost wondering if there’s something else making matching less reliable for you. You gave a TV episode name as an example. Can you share your directory structure?
Show Name, A/Season XX/Show Name, A - S01E04 - Episode Name.xyz
?
Perhaps it’s something else, and worth sharing logs.
They used to match 99% of the time with my “standard” file sort. Then something changed about 18 months ago and they match 0% of the time. My structure hasn’t changed. I think it’s the almost standard naming convention that Plex publshes:
\videos
\series
\Alienist, The (2018)
\Season 01
\Alienist, The (2018) - s01e01 - The Boy on the Bridge - 1080P BluRay x265 - RlsGrp.mp4
\Alienist, The (2018) - s01e01 - The Boy on the Bridge - 1080P BluRay x265 - RlsGrp.en.srt
\Alienist, The (2018) - s01e01 - The Boy on the Bridge - 1080P BluRay x265 - RlsGrp.pt.srt
\Altered Carbon (2018)
\Season 01
\Altered Carbon (2018) - s01e01 - Out of the Past - WEBRip-1080p Proper REAL x264 - RlsGrp.mkv
\Altered Carbon (2018) - s01e01 - Out of the Past - WEBRip-1080p Proper REAL x264 - RlsGrp.en.srt
\Altered Carbon (2018) - s01e01 - Out of the Past - WEBRip-1080p Proper REAL x264 - RlsGrp.pt.srt
Maybe it’s like the dreaded double space when typing. I’m sooooo old that it was beaten in to my head to always double space between sentences. I know the world has changed and this is no longer standard…but my programming is so entrenched that I simply must type two spaces between sentences.
It’s the same for alphabetizing. We used to use old card catalogs when I was in school. Alphabetizing was a part of English class in elementary school and it was drilled in to my head to not sort articles in with the real name.
So, perhaps I’m just a dinosaur and as unnatural as it sounds and feels to me, I should get with the times.
I am genuinely surprised that I’m the only one on this forum who thinks this way. Certainly there is someone even older than me out there?
If John Smith appeared in a list sorted by last name (which is standard), then yes, it would be “Smith, John.” Didn’t your PE teacher or coach just refer to you by your last name?
I know that 99% of the time it happily goes digging into the hierarchy. And I’ve had OK luck with really messy movie libraries.
But I swear - and dammit, if you make me, I’ll go waste a bunch of time trying to prove it - that TV libraries match better if they aren’t buried multiple layers deep. I admit that sounds like superstition. Grrr.
Maybe the only problems were with extras, not actually matching the shows themselves. I’ll prove it, sonny. Get off my lawn.
