Server Version#: Version 4.147.1
Player Version#: Latest on LG webos
Hello,
New to Plex here. I thought it may be useful as so many people recommend it. But its simply creating problems.
Setup: New Lg TV C5 with Plex app installed. PC: Windows 11 with plex media server.
Lets say I have 1 USB drive connected with a bunch of movies and TV shows. Plex is messing everything up when I view the contents on my TV. Even if I select the option to view by “folder”, it’s naming “show A” as “show B” and so on. Even the number of files are different. If the folder structure on my disc is, say: Show A/(with 10 episodes), Show B/w(with 5 episodes), I see random number of episodes in Plex folder view. They are also named completely wrong.
I don’t want to install any extra addons (like radarr/sonarr etc). Nor do I want to go to every file/folder individually and edit metadata manually.
My folders/files are already sorted well. Can I just have Plex list it out on the TV “as it appears”, (just like a computer’s file browser) without using any smartness? That would be great.
@electronicsguy I know you say your stuff is named OK, but I am going to bet its good for you, not for software like plex.
To that point, If you get a program like TinyMediaManager or FileBot, you can cleanup your entire library in a matter of a couple of hours at most, and then you can leverage modern apps like Plex.
So emby has this option of “group items into collections”, which works great for me since it is giving a proper folder/file view of all contents, with some smartness to detect series name, show cover art. It’s not mixing up files of different series together, just because the files names may be same (like episode S1xE1) of “show A” with “show B”, as long as they’re in different folders.
Plex will let you set a library type as generic “video” and you can view such a library as folder structure. If you are insistent on making zero changes to your file naming and organization, that is your best bet.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. I do use the DLNA server method, but the native media player app on the LG TV doesn’t have any control for audio track/subtitle selection, plus a bunch of others things.
It’d be great if we could program Plex to look at folder/files combination and internally generate a title tag from it. Something like “TV shows/Series Name/Season 1/ep 1 - pilot” should automatically be treated as “Series Name - S1:E1 - pilot” and it could then fetch all the relevant metadata for this. Is there a programmatic way to tell Plex to do this?
ok, then I don’t know why its happening. Let me try and explain. I don’t want to rename files in Plex-specific way. If I have 2 TV shows in 2 folders:
TV/Show_A/Season 1/ep1 - pilot.mkv, ep2.mkv…
TV/Show_A/Season 2/ep1.mkv, ep2.mkv…
TV/Show_A/Season 3/ep1.mkv, ep2.mkv…
TV/Show_B/Season 1/ep1 - pilot.mkv, ep2.mkv…
Its thinking all the episodes are of a single show, say “Show_B”. the titles displayed in Plex may be of Show_B, even though the underlying file itself is of Show_A.
Its too much of a hassle to manually change all shows/files to fit a particular schema. Even if there are plugins, it doesn’t always work correctly. I already have media sorted innto multiple folders/sub-folders/files on my USB drives. All I want is to get them:
at the minimum, in the same folder/file way like file explorer, but within plex
maybe add some smart metadata but it has to be consistent and correct. For any given file, it should only look at its parent folders and deduce the correct Title from that. That’s NOT what’s happening currently. Its mixing up files, titles, series and everything becomes mixed up.
If this is happening there are a couple of reasons:
file naming, you can use something as simple as Renamer to do minimal file cleanup (your file names are already fairly close to standard. I would suggest tweaking the name to SxxExx instead of epxx (Plex needs both season and episode numbers)
what folder did you point Plex to?
Movies and TV shows cannot share the same folder, you need to create separate base folders (which I think you are doing)
the Media type (Movie,TV) needs to be set correctly on the library.
You’re already very close to Plex-compliant naming based on your examples, as @dbirch pointed out, but if change is not an option then Plex is probably not the right software for you. The only compromise I can think of is a Video library with viewing by folders turned on, but there will be zero metadata lookups without naming things Plex’s way, and setting up TV and Movie libraries.
