Organization of movies

General Discussions
1

I have all my movies; 21 Jump Street (2016) for example and they are all in a folder titled Movies. Do I need to have each movie in an individual folder. I’m still having issues with movies that aren’t showing and I have tv shows appearing in my movie section. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

2

Read Media Preparation Guidelines.

Movies & TV shows must be kept in separate directories. Also, each movie or tv show needs to be in its own folder, with subfolders for each tv season. You should also follow Plex’s naming conventions, especially for TV shows.

Examples below, but you should read the guidelines to get all the details.

Note: Plex ignores text between square brackets. If you need to have other info in a file name, put it between brackets. Ex: Avatar (2009) [720p].mkv is OK. Avatar.2009.720p.D0wnloadphr3ak.likes.puppies.mkv is not.

Organization structure is:

/Media
   /Movies
      movie content
   /Music
      music content
   /TV Shows
      television content

Movies example:

/Movies
   /Avatar (2009)
      Avatar (2009).mkv

TV Show example:

/TV Shows
   /Grey's Anatomy
      /Season 01
         Grey's Anatomy - s01e01.avi
         Grey's Anatomy - s01e02 - The First Cut is the Deepest.avi
      /Season 02
         Grey's Anatomy - s02e01.avi
2 Likes
3

I have the Shark Week 20th Anniversary Collection and don’t know how to name the files correctly. It isn’t a “season” and I think it is from 2007, but there is a season 2007 that includes different episodes. I apologize for being ignorant, I just want to make sure I name files and put in the correct hierarchy. Any help is appreciated.

4

You’ve already found/posted in a separate post dedicated to this question

Plex is using TheTVDb.com as its primary source for tv show metadata.
That being said… it can sometimes be tricky to properly identify content which is released differently on DVD.

Your best shot could be to have a look and see if you can find the names of those episodes on TheTVDb.com and figure out which season/episode they belong to. To avoid jumping from season to season you can click on the All Seasons link on their homepage.

5

Ok, so I figured out each segments season year and episode number but it is still not getting recognized by the database.

“…TV Shows\Shark Week\Season 1998\s1998e01.mkv”

What am I doing wrong?

6

Naming needs to be like this:

TV Shows
   > Shark Week
      > Season 1998
         > Shark Week - s1998e01.mkv
         > Shark Week - s1998e02.mkv

If Plex had processed the files before, you might need to perform the “Plex Dance” to overcome some of the mechanisms Plex applies to maintain your viewing history / manual updates to a file it already knew.

  1. move the Shark Week folder outside the TV Shows folder
  2. scan the tv show library for updates and wait for it to complete
  3. empty trash via this library’s context menu
  4. move the Shark Week folder back in place
  5. scan the tv show library again for updates
7

Beyond frustrated. I removed from library, scanned library, emptied trash, clean bundles, modified file structure & names, moved Shark Week folder back into TV Shows, scanned library…still no good.

“Q:\TV Shows\Shark Week\Season 1998\Shark Week - s1998e01.mkv”

I really don’t understand what I’m missing. I’ve tried removing folder, doing the plex dance multiple times, then putting the folder back. Sigh. Any ideas?

image
image1055×474 91.5 KB

8

2 things for you to check:

  1. if you edit your library inside Plex and check out the Advanced tab… what scanner/agent have you selected? – is it e.g. TheTVDB.com or The Movie Database?
  2. when you go to the library and click the context menu of the show… does Plex offer an option to unmatch / fix match?
9
  1. TheTVDB.com
  2. Yes, I’ve tried fixing match. It appears to match with Shark Week.
    image
    image960×521 16.9 KB

    image
    image1328×377 24.7 KB

Any other ideas?

10

I used an episode of Bones and dummied up this show. Here’s how I laid it out:

01%20PM
01%20PM644×202 25.3 KB

Here’s how it loaded into Plex:

36%20PM
36%20PM894×559 620 KB

An individual season:

48%20PM
48%20PM796×584 463 KB

Adding the start year to the show name in both the Show Folder and the Show Name in each episode as in the first picture has helped make Plex match my shows a lot better. Plus if you have the original and a remake it differentiates the two shows. Having each season in a Season folder seems to also make Plex happier.

Looking at it in the TVDB, this show’s metadata is pretty sparse. Some of the episodes don’t have Episode Names or Screenshots (thumbnails in Plex). But you can get it to match and get what they have.

Hope this helps!

1 Like
11

Good grief! I removed the folder from TV, did the plex dance, renamed the folders & files following your example, put the folder back in TV. Still didn’t work. I walked away from it for a day, came back, removed the folder again. Looked carefully at your example and found there was one difference, a Season 1988 folder and file. So I wanted mine to be exactly like your example and created the '88 folder with an '88 file. Put the whole thing back into TV and it worked. I then removed the fake '88 folder and file. I have no clue as to why that worked but I’ll take it. :slight_smile: Thank you all for your help.

12

Cool! Glad you got it worked out. Getting files to match seems to be an art in Plex. Lot’s of good help on the forums though.

13

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