Not seeing all video files

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.21.1.3830-6c22540d5
Player Version#: n/a

I have installed Plex a while back on my iMac and pointed it to my iTunes library located on an external Promise RAID array connected directly to the iMac by thunderbolt. It’s able to see most of my video library but it’s missing some of the episodes of various TV shows. For example, I have all episodes of every season of The X-Files, but Plex only added 1 episode of seasons 1-9 and 6 episodes of season 10 and 10 episodes of season 11.
My library was organized by iTunes as:
iTunes - TV Shows - Show - Season - episode.
attached is a directory listing of The X-Files to show how it’s organized.
listing.txt (10.5 KB)

When I first installed Plex and saw this problem, I thought that maybe the files were corrupt as I had previously had to recover some files from various failing hard drives before getting the Promise RAID. But yesterday I heard of Jellyfin and decided to try it out and it was able to see everything. I had other trouble with Jellyfin so uninstalled it. I then did a reset of the Plex library and re scanned my Movies and TV Shows folders one at a time but still the same problem.
Any ideas what’s causing this and how to fix it?

thanks and happy new year!

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Plex is happily opinionated about how files should be organized and named. :slight_smile:

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everything seems to be named according to the convention in that article

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They’re readable to a human, but none of them match the convention in the article.

Plex is looking for this:

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

So for example:

Season 1
    The X-Files - S01E01 - Pilot.mp4
    The X-Files - S01E02 - Deep Throat.mp4

Season 11
    The X-Files - S11E01.mp4
    The X-Files - S11E02.mp4

The Special you have in Season 10 is best moved if you would like metadata to be fetched automatically. Here’s the TVDB link for it.

Specials
    The X-Files - S00E07 - Re-Opened.mp4

Another approach people sometimes use with Specials, if they really want to keep them in a Season folder, is to name them S10E00 or S10E107 and manually fill in the metadata as desired.

For the Season 9 file with episodes 19 and 20 concatenated together, you have a couple choices.

First (recommended) is to split it into two episodes.

Second is to just name it like this:

Season 9
    The X-Files - S09E19 - The Truth.mp4

In that case there won’t be an E20 in the library, but everything will just work.

Another choice is to name it like this:

Season 9
    The X-Files - S09E19-E20 - The Truth.mp4

In that case, both episodes will show up in Plex … but when you try to play either of them, both episodes will play. It’s quite confusing.

If you have a significant amount of media to clean up, consider investing in FileBot or TMM.

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ah ok, I see what your saying now. I did a test and renamed several episodes of season 1 to ‘The X-Files s01eXX’ and let Plex scan the library and that fixed it! Now to go through my entire library and make the changes… :doh: :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

thanks for your help, much appreciated!!!

1 Like
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Changing the first few dozen by hand is fun, and then the next hundred is tolerable while you’re watching a show.

After that you’ll get annoyed and switch to an automatic tool and wish you’d done it sooner :slight_smile: :smiley:

Happy New Year!

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There’s an automatic tool to do this?!?! What kind of devilry is this? :wink:
can you point me to one for Mac?

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FileBot might be the most popular option. Pretty expensive at $6/yr.

TMM used to be free, now it’s 10 euros/yr. Huh … when did that happen?

I forgot about RenameMyTVSeries until somebody mentioned it earlier today! It’s free but I managed to make it crash while sorting a list of names. :frowning_face:

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I discovered RenameMyTVSeries 2 minutes before I saw your post. It’s working great!
thanks for all your help today!!!
:100:

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I think it looks serviceable but I’m not in love with it. The price is great.

In the settings the default is XXYY naming. You can configure it to use sXXeYY which would be preferred for Plex. The second setting is reasonable.

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You might also change all of the character replacement options. Instead of replacing things with other characters, change it to remove the special characters [EMPTY]. Otherwise it does horrid things to quotes.

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finally got my library all cleaned up. Found some other issues I wasn’t aware of and fixed them. All good now.
thanks for your help!!!

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