I’m trying to add my collection of 180 Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies shorts to Plex, and although they’re not really a TV show, it seems like that fits better than having them added as 180 different movies. Unfortunately, they don’t show up at all in Plex after I added them to my TV shows folder. After reading up on Plex naming conventions, I tried renaming one to have a random date in the filename, and sure enough it popped up.
I’d really like to not have to rename 180 files to get them to show up in Plex, especially since most of them actually do have the release date already in their metadata, and the folder is shared with an iTunes server that’s going to get confused if I rename all the files out from under it. Is there any other way anyone can think of? It seems like Plex should always look for metadata first before trying to guess things from the filename, since the metadata lets you be more exact, use special characters that are disallowed in filenames, and is generally just easier to manage.
If the internal metadata are not what plex expects also for a file name, then they won’t be of much use.
You could try Filebot and see if this can make a clever guess and find out which episode is which from the current filename.
Specialty for Looney Tunes:
they use the release year as season number
So the right folder and file name format would be:
TV Shows /
Looney Tunes /
Season 1948 /
Looney Tunes - s1948e07 - A Hick A Slick And A Chick.ext
thanks, that works, but how do you know how to name the files.
for instance my disney animated shorts and comicolor cartoons are just in yearly folders and not prefaced with anything for the filename (just the year x episode number)
Following the tvdb name one is lead to name the files as year x episode, but that is not the case with looney tunes?!?
for instance my disney animated shorts and comicolor cartoons are just in yearly folders and not prefaced with anything for the filename (just the year x episode number)
Following the tvdb name one is lead to name the files as year x episode, but that is not the case with looney tunes?!?
Not exactly. On TheTVDB website they write [season]x[episode],
but Plex requires show title - sxxeyy. (xx = season number, yy = episode number)
You just grab the exact spelling of the show’s title and the ‘season’ and ‘episode’ numbers from there.
The special case for ‘Looney Tunes’ and ‘Disney Animated Shorts’ is, that the season numbers are 4-digit.
Take the title as it is used on TheTVDB. If there is something in parentheses, take that too. If the title contains invalid characters (depends on your file system, like § : % *, simply leave them out).
Check the naming and the folder structure of your show. Name the top folder of the show exactly after the title on TheTVDB. No abbreviations. No additional subfolders. No aliases.
Name the episode files according to the above linked naming guide. Use the same title as for the top folder. Show's Title - s01e01 - additional info.ext (‘- additional info’ can be left out)
After you corrected the naming and folder structure, perform the Plex Dance with all files for this show.
There is software which looks up the show and supports you with the renaming, once you taught it the proper Plex naming style. Filebot for instance.
I’m just going to answer my own question here, years later, so the forum stops bugging me. I decided to put theatrical shorts (Looney Tunes, Three Stooges, Merry Melodies, Tom and Jerry, etc) in their own library of type “Other Videos”, that way I can control the organization myself. The one nuisance is that Plex still ignores the metadata, so I have to edit the title and release date and such manually from Plex when I add new media, but that’s a one-time bother, and from there out it works ok.