Plex not applying metadata to certain playlists

General Discussions
1

I have a fresh install of Plex Server on my unraid server. So far I have 4 playlists for my movies and one for my TV show files. All of the playlists for my movies automatically had metadata and their thumbnails applied to them. The tv show playlists however only a quarter were applied and the rest are blank. Even after going through several shows and attempting to manually searching and applying either through Tvdb or Moviedatabase the proper title and thumbnail are never applied. The majority remain with blank grey boxes. I’ve re-scanned the playlist and also toggled the reset metadata feature several times to no changes.

2

Based on your description, I suppose you mean “Libraries” and not “Playlists”…
For Plex to find the right metadata (or to find any metadata at all) it’s important to follow the naming conventions described in the support articles on Media Preparation. While Plex can be forgiving in the context of movies, this is mandatory for tv shows!

Movies should be named…
Your Movies Folder / Movie Name (<Release Year>).ext (where ext is the extension of your file)
or Your Movies Folder / Movie Name (<Release Year>) / Movie Name (<Release Year>).ext (if you want to use local posters, subtitles or other Local Media Assets).
example: My Movies / Gandhi (1982).mkv

TV Shows should be named…
Your TV Shows Folder / Show Name (<First Aired Year>) > Season <XX> / Show Name (<First Aired Year>) - S<XX>E<YY>.ext (where <XX> is the 2-digit season number and <YY> is the 2-digit episode number, according to e.g. The TVDB)
example: My TV Shows / Futurama (1999) / Season 01 / Futurama (1999) - S01E04.mkv
according to https://www.thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=73871&lid=7

–
edit: added link to Media Preparation support articles

3

Thanks for your reply. My Tv show directory is setup in that order and it still doesn’t work. When I attempt to manually retrieve the metadata and find it and tell plex to apply it to that media. It does the hour glass icon over the box icon and then nothing happens. No thumbnail, or title change, or media info.

E.G: TV Shows / Simpsons / S1 / S01E01.mkv

I searched the above through “fix match”, found it, told plex to apply it. Nothing changed.

4

this is how your example is wrong:
The episode should be named like one of these examples

  • TV Shows > The Simpsons (1989) > Season 01 > The Simpsons (1989) - S01E01.mkv
  • TV Shows > The Simpsons > Season 01 > The Simpsons - S01E01.mkv

notice:

  • the show is called The Simpsons in The TVDB
  • the Season folder should be Season 01 – not S1 (also the 0 is important!)
  • the episode name must contain the show name
  • the year is optional as there’s only 1 show called The Simpsons

try to fix this, then we can look into if/why Plex might not consider the match.

5

PS: if you have lots of files to re-name you might want to look into an app called FileBot (instead of doing this all manually). If you’re on macOS, you could also directly mass rename your files in Finder.