Naruto has over 200 episodes. But Plex has done a really bad job of sorting it out. Any episode above 100 is automatically merged with a lower episode. For example in this episode the episode 1 has been merged with episode 101.
I have searched forums which called for renaming all two digits files to EPxxx in three digits which has already been done as in the screenshot above. It should be noted that the question is 6 years old and yet not a fix has been issued. Is there any fix in plex that would help to solve Shows with more than a 100 episodes.
I recommend you take a look at the proposed naming convention / schema of Plex.
From my own library:
TV Shows <- the folder linked to my Plex TV Shows library
Naruto (2002)
Season 01
Naruto (2002) - s01e01 - Enter Naruto Uzumaki.mkv
...
Season 03
Naruto (2002) - s03e18 - Gotta See! Gotta Know! Kakashi-Sensei's True Face.mkv
...
This example is following TheTVDb’s airing order. Alternatively you can organize the show by DVD or absolute order – however even if you want to use “absolute order”, you’ll need to flag those files as part of season 01 (s01e01-s01e220)
Edit: The year ((2002)) included in my example isn’t strictly necessary
You are waay off on the naming of the files. It is a wonder it has worked to this point. It should be something close to …Local Disk D\Movies\Anime\Naruto\Naruto - SxxExx - Enter Naruto Uzumaki! [DarkDream}.mkv .
Cleaning up the naming may let you use three digit episodes, however TVDB shows this show has 5 seasons and no more than 48 episodes in any one season. (https://thetvdb.com/series/naruto)
You can use an app like FileBot to do the renaming for you. Edit: establishing a clean baseline that works well with your Plex Media Server should be worth a little effort… all tinkering will be gone if bad comes to worse and you might need to rebuild your library at some point down the road. Fixing the names will persist.
Absolute order is just another way the TVDB displays shows Seasonal, DVD Order, or absolute, See the @tom80H comment above for format. It will take a lot of renaming on your part.
Yes thanks. I was able to use a linux app called krename. I used the find and replace to replace the starting string "Naruto - " With “Naruto S01E” So the episode was formatted as Naruto S01E001 and so on. Thank you
Filebot is great, but doesn’t let you actually use it for free like it used to. I ended up sucking it up and paying for it, but I just wanted to chime in and say that Bulk Rename Utility is also amazing and is free.
Honestly, I use both. FileBot is great for automatically finding names and applying them, and Bulk Rename Utility is great for manually renaming a large amount of files and has a ton of features to do so. Like I said, it’s worth having both since they cover different situations.
For instance, I had every Shippuden episode but they were split up into seasons wrong (like, one season had 10 too many episode and the next 10 too few, etc). It was like this for the last half of the series, and FileBot couldn’t deal with it. It just bugged out and was completely off. I needed to move the files to the right season subfolders before FileBot could properly rename everything, and there were TONS of them. Using Bulk Rename Utility I was able to move each file to it’s appropriate folder and then quickly replace the “S0X” prefix on each file with the proper one in one click. Then, I could run the entire directory through FileBot and it worked just fine in Plex. That’s just one example of how they compliment eachother.
If you didn’t want to pay for FileBot, though, you could just use Bulk Rename. Open all the files in it, shift-select everything from Season 1, and append “S01EXX” to the front where the XX is an automatically incrementing number. Then select the episodes from Season 2 and do the same, and have the count increase from where it left off at Season 1. This is actually what I did for my original Naruto episodes, before I had FileBot, which also came individually numbered.
Anyways, like I’ve now said 10 times, FileBot and Bulk Rename Utility are both incredible and are both worth having, but if you don’t want to spend any money you can certainly get by with just the latter and just spend a little bit more time getting everything right. It won’t automatically put episode titles into the name or anything, but your Plex should be pulling that data from the database API anyways.
Thanks for this information it was helpful. I was having the same issue with Bleach that I have numbered as 1-365.
I did have an alternative solution that worked for me. I separated out the Episodes 1-99 into a Season 1 folder, 100 - 199 into a Season 2 folder, 200 - 299 into a Season 3 folder, and 300 - 365 into a Season 4 folder.
This allowed Plex to separate episode 1-99 from episode 100-199 without having to rename the file itself.
It seems to me your „solution“ is doing its job if you severely lowered your expectations as for how you want to use Plex — e.g. no episode metadata etc.
To achieve that you don’t have to put the files in different folders.
Properly naming the files (manually or using a fee app) and setting the correct episode order within Plex (e.g. absolute order) as described above does the job.
