My server is currently running version 1.19.4.2935 and I’m usually using the default web player (currently 4.30.2).
Since my library is rather big (some might say excessive), I’ve started to reorganize it from the ground up by renaming everything uniformly.
With movies this has worked out so far without any problems.
After some expansion in the music library, I decided to follow up on that and restructuring the library folder to the same standard.
It seems like the server could recognize any existing files properly and could match them correctly.
But this seems not to be working with the TV shows - neither in English, nor in German (for which I have only a few shows).
Same principle:
This results in Plex only seeing the first series in each alphabet folder, and trying to match that to the letter - and not the series directory’s name.
I’m aware, that neither use case is detailed in the support articles about naming TV Shows or movies.
I’m just curious if I did something wrong, or rather looking for an explanation why it works with movies and music, but not for TV shows.
If you need further information, don’t hesitate to ask, I’ll try to answer them as accurate as possible.
Add each [AlphabetLetter] subfolder as a directory to Plex when you go to [TV Shows Library]->Manage Library->Edit… and then click on the Add Folders tab.
Remove the root folder /[TVLibraryFolder]/ and then have /[TVLibraryFolder]/[AlphabetLetter]/ for all the folders Plex should look at.
This will allow you to keep the organization you want and let Plex work correctly.
The simplest explanation is that movies match individual files to corresponding entries in the movie database.
TV Shows try to match groups of files to a specific show. This becomes harder for the system to do when you’re not using the prescribed structure:
MainFolder > TV Show > Seasons > IndividualFiles
Plex is going to look for individual shows at the main level and match those folders. In your use case, it’s searching for show “A”, show “B”, etc…
First of all, thanks so much for the amazingly fast reply, both of you @AmazingRando24 , and @shark2k .
Rando, thanks for explaining the different search / crawler approach for TV shows.
And yes, shark, your method seems to be working just fine.
I not only learnt, that you can add multiple folders to the same library, thanks to your answer, but I could also solve the issue I had.
Thanks a lot for it!
In each of my Movies and TV folders, I have a “#BACKUP” folder where I put Movies / TV that I have bought from digital sources and want to include in a backup. The other stuff does not get backed up because I still have the original source (DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.)
Example: /drive/tv and //drive/tv/#BACKUP
For Movies, this is no problem. Plex scans within the #BACKUP folder and picks up everything inside.
For TV, this was not working. Presumably because the scanner needs to accommodate multiple levels of folders in the naming scheme (I have no idea if this is true).
So, what worked for me was:
Add both the parent folder and the subfolder to the list of folders that make up the library (i.e. /drive/tv and /drive/tv/#BACKUP)
Create a .plexignore file in the parent folder with the name of the subfolder (i.e. *BACKUP/* - I had to use asterisk because ‘#’ is interpreted as a comment)
After doing the Plex Dance (remove the folder of the problematic TV show, scan, empty trash, clean bundles, restore TV show folder, scan), the show appeared in the library.
Before I created the .plexignore file, it did not work.
