Plex Mashing All Shows Episodes Into Single Folder By Season

[berens3]

Server Version#: latest
Player Version#: latest

My folder structure is TV Shows/Kids/Show Name/Season/Show Name S01E01 Episode Title
I also have TV Shows/Parents/Show Name/Season/Show Name S01E01 Episode Title
When I go to view TV Shows I can navigate to a show via folder but when I click on an episode to play it, I get taken to a screen where all episodes from all TV Shows are put into folders called Season 1, Season 2, etc.
To make it worse, all episodes are titled Episode 1, Episode 2, etc. and each episode has a number of different versions
Its like Plex sees all the TV Shows, says 'These are all Season 1 Episode 1 in this stack, these are all Season 1 Episode 2 in this stack, and so on."

If I click on a thumbnails 3-dot menu and then click ‘get info’ there is a huge list of all the different episodes classified as Episode 1. The xml for it is very long.

Why is it doing this?
Why won’t it just play the files selected from a folder?
Additionally, the file names in the screenshot aren’t even the filenames on disk, does that mean the metadata is screwing everything up?

[tom80H]

I take it your library is not pointing at TV Shows/Parents/ and TV Shows/Kids/?
Given the names showing on those episodes it seems they all have bad embedded metadata or are not matched in the first place.

@berens3

Why won’t it just play the files selected from a folder?

Because Plex isn’t acting as a mere file browser. It’ll try to match your files and associate them to the show/season/episode based on your folder organization and file naming.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/

[dbirch]

I would recommend following the naming schema above, and it should be Show/Season #/show S##E## name.ext and make sure you are pointing to the root of that folder. Having intermediate directories will causing parsing errors