I’m not sure if this is the good place to make a bug report / design mistake.
I discovered that, as the title says, PLEX is unable to read / recognize and add a movie folder whose name starts with a dot character. Not even the PLEX directory explorer in the plex server, it ignores any folder whose name starts with a dot character.
For example I have this folder: D:\Series\Animation\.hack ∕ ∕ SIGN
PLEX will not recognize that folder in the PLEX directory explorer. And when adding TV shows, it will ignore that folder with name ‘.hack ∕ ∕ SIGN’.
I do not pretend to modify the name of that folder, and I’m aware of the “S01E01” pattern that I’m not using (I think it will not solve the problem). I’m just trying to report this design mistake in case of developers would like to consider fix this.
IMO, I don’t consider PMS ignoring files/folders that begin with a dot being a design mistake even on a Windows system considering how Unix/Linux treat such things.
Thanks for answer. I don’t know anything about Unix / Linux systems, but this regards to the PLEX server for Windows, so it should be a fully acceptable request since those folders with dot as first char are not treated different than any other folder.
Precisely if consistency / cross-platform compatibility counts for anything, then “X” in one specific O.S should not be treated in the same way as it is treated in another operating system, which as per you have said is treated differently. So the software must be aware of it and try to do things in the most correct way for each specific O.S.
Take into account that we are talking just about the first character of the name of a folder in Windows O.S, and it is not any special / reserved character by the O.S. It’s just a dot. I think Linux / Unix differences (which I confess that I ignore because:) they are not relevant with this scenario.
Are you really willing to argue and discuss with me that PLEX is not having a inconsistent behavior when handling / parsing directory names for Windows O.S?.
Consistency = PLEX treats folder names properly in both Unix/Linux and Windows.
Inconsistency = PLEX ignore folders with specific names in Windows for no justified reason, which makes it less compatible for this specific O.S.
Also, I can’t think of any other cross-platform software that has its Windows binary, with a folder dialog just for example, that will ignore folders with a dot char as first char of that folder name. It’s ridiculous.
Sorry but I won’t enter to discuss something obvious like that. I already explained the problem. A folder with a dot as first char in Microsoft windows will be ignored by PLEX directory explorer and the scanners. Is that consistency?, no, of course it is not.
I think a point was missed that @dduke2104 was trying to make @CSG1986, and that is it’s ‘consistent’ behavior across all OS’s to ignore the dot. It would be inconsistent to selectively alter behavior for each OS.
Now to actually help you Try naming your directory: hack (2002) [tvdb-79099] which should match just fine. I’d strongly suggest using something like Sonarr in the future to help you out with naming, as it makes this kind of issue trivial.
Did something change since this forum post? I’ve seen Plex correctly identify shows this way that it used to struggle with. Rebirth: りばあす - TheTVDB.com is a good example, it often matches https://www.thetvdb.com/series/rebirth
I was going by the documentation which specifies curly braces.
I have not tried the other layouts.
Regarding square brackets, further in the same thread, this post is referenced, which admittedly is for the old scanners, and apparently did not carry over to the new scanner.
My personal rule of thumb is to match the documentation. Other things might work, but what is documented works 99% of the time.
Interesting, wonder if the Docs are stale. Sounds like another mass rename is in order
EDIT: @FordGuy61 do you know if using tmdb or imdb is an OR or is it an AND? Trying to figure out if I can include both imdb and tmdb id’s for my files, in case one lacks the other.
I’m not sure using both is necessary or would help (or would even work).
My understanding of the new scanner:
Plex gathers movie/show information from many sources, combines it together, and hosts it on a plex.tv system.
When a movie is added to Plex Media Server, it queries the plex.tv host, which returns the requested metadata.
Adding the IMDB or TMDB ID helps Plex match the correct movie. However, it still returns the metadata combined from many sources. It does not tell Plex “give me the info from imdb.com” or “give me the info from themoviedb.org.”
Look at the first paragraph of “New Plex Media Server Scanner” thread: “…to bring together multiple metadata sources such as IMDb, TheMovieDb, Rotten Tomatoes,…”
Also, look at the XML information for a movie. You’ll see references to information from multiple sources - imdb, tmdb, tvdb, and metadata-static.plex.tv.
Hey guys thanks for trying to help but let me rescue this quote from my first post to answer all of you:
My folder name is named exactly like the tv serie name, whose name starts with a dot character. So why I should modify it?. That will be inconsistent.
Renaming the folder name will be more like a patch to cover a software design problem, than a real solution.
The only viable solution for me is that PLEX could consider to not ignore folders whose names starts with a dot char under Microsoft Windows, just like any other software that does not ignore them when navigating through folders.
My files, my server, for sure… but the strict non-versatile naming rules that the developers had put. In fact I think this even cannot be considered a rule, this is just a lack of functionality for handling specific Windows O.S filenames.
So I have no real choice for adding the TV serie since I don’t pretend to modify the folder name of my TV serie to use a inappropriate name for this tv serie just to let PLEX handle a name without a dot.
It is the software the one who should take care of this, not me caring of doing inappropriate things to find workarounds for the software’s lack of filename handling.
A dot as the first character of a file/folder name declares the file as “hidden”. That is consistent behaviour across most commonly used operating systems.
You have to rename the folder to either have something else before the dot, or remove the dot. This is the same as not being able to use some specific special characters in file/folder names, eventhough a movie/show might contain them in the official title. (For example: A lot of titles contain the “:” character, but you can’t use it on file/folder names on windows, so you’d have to name them slightly different from the official title)
EDIT: Like… if it’s so important to you to never even just slightly deviate from the official title, are you just not going to watch any movies/shows that contain colons, asteriks, slashes, question marks, etc.?
Sorry but I don’t care of other O.S., this question regards only to Windows O.S. where a dot as first chars means nothing you said. File attributes (eg. HIDDEN) are managed different.
If I was on Unix / Linux then I would adapt to the limitations or behavior of the operating system. But it is not the case in Windows. And in any case I would adapt my folder name to the limitations of a software that does not take into consideration that this is not the case for Windows O.S.
It’s a fault of the software itself / the developers for not taking it into account. So it is not me who should put its best in order to make things work as expected.
That is only partially true. The “:” character is considered illegal in a Windows filename, however, it can be replaced for any unicode equivalent, like for example the “꞉” char.
Same for any other special / illegal character you can think, like “/”, “*” or “?”.
I have more than 5.000 movies in a HDD, and I always do the equivalent replacement to rename any movie that requires it. Some examples of folder names / movie official titles with “special” characters that I have are these:
Another example with the usage of “꞉” char for movie sagas:
Halloween [01]꞉ La noche de Halloween (1978)
Halloween [02]꞉ ¡Sanguinario! (1981)
Halloween [03]꞉ El día de la bruja (1982)
Halloween [04]꞉ El regreso de Michael Myers (1988)
Halloween [05]꞉ La venganza de Michael Myers (1989)
Halloween [06]꞉ La maldición de Michael Myers (1995)
Halloween [07]꞉ H20, veinte años después (1998)
Halloween [08]꞉ Resurrection (2002)
Halloween [09]꞉ El origen (2007)
Halloween [10]꞉ Halloween II (H2) (2009)
Halloween [11]꞉ La noche de Halloween (2018)
(Please avoid warning me about following PLEX naming rules to match movie titles. Every folder has its own .nfo inside with the IMDB title id, so it always matches the proper movie regardless of my folder naming ordering.)
Everything works fine with PLEX when adding any of those folder names.
But a folder name like this will not work for no justifiable reason:
.Folder name (year)
…just because the folder name starts with a dot character, forcing me to do a inappropriate character replacement to use a similar dot, like “․” (U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER) which works fine.
it’s a ridiculous PLEX server inconsistency for Windows. And trying to justify this lack of functionality by arguing that dots or other things are managed different in another operating system, is completely irrelevant.
Try naming your directory: hack (2002) [tvdb-79099] which should match just fine. I’d strongly suggest using something like Sonarr in the future to help you out with naming, as it makes this kind of issue trivial.
