Here’s a puzzle:
I’ve had Family Guy and The Simpsons episodes in Plex for a while. Just the last week or two, I found it wasn’t adding the new episodes.
Now, I do name my files: Example:
The Simpsons - 3204 - Title of Episode (as opposed to The Simpsons - s32e04 - Title of Episode).
Up until a week or two ago, Plex was adding the episodes. When I saw it didn’t, I did a library scan of each show and all the episodes disappeared. My naming scheme works for everything else. I’m thinking it has to do with the high Season number on these two shows (18 and 32). When I rename the episodes to The Simpsons - s32e04 - Title, it found them all.
It’s not so much a puzzle as your having gotten lucky for a while. Plex’s TV scanner tries really hard to make sense of whatever you give it. Sometimes it is able to, for a time. But, like any house of cards, it eventually falls down. The door slam that knocked yours down was probably the season change; someone else reported the same thing a couple of days ago, I believe.
The only way to achieve (mostly) consistently correct results is to use the documented naming guidelines. You may still encounter issues from time to time, but at least the first thing you hear when you show your naming isn’t going “You’re doing it wrong.”
That’s funny, those are two of the like 5 shows (out of hundreds) I had problems with. Had to rename to S32E04, etc to make it work again. I swear something must have been tweaked in the back end that brought the house of cards down. But, no way around it but to rename it seems.
The scanner was doing fine for years (seasons 30, 31, and the first 4 episodes of 32), as well as Family Guy’s double-digit seasons.
PLUS, I have no trouble with 20-something seasons of Doctor Who (1963) and now, 12 seasons of DW (2005).
Oh, I have no doubts about that As I said, the scanner tries really hard to make sense of whatever naming scheme you use. Folks have had successful matches with other unsupported naming schemes as well; however, much like your situation, they eventually stopped successfully matching, too.
There are tools which can help you with the task of renaming/reorganizing your media, FileBot in particular is highly-recommended.
I use the same naming convention “Series - 1101 - Title” and have been the entire time I’ve been using Plex (since 2013) with no issues. However, recently I noticed that adding seasons to a TV show with a double digit season no longer gets recognized. The dozens of other double-digit seasons already indexed show up and work fine still, unless I remove and re-add one as a test.
Switching to the s11e01 format for episode number does get the scanner to recognize and index the episode, but I do not want to change from the format I prefer.
It seems there was a change (maybe in 1.20.4.3508?) that changed how TV episode file parsing works which broke this. It would be much appreciated if this behavior could be restored.
PlexMediaServer-1.21.0.3711-b509cc236 on Ubuntu 20.04.1
