I’m new to the awesome world of Plex and I love it so far. I’ve been in the chains of iTunes for way too long. I have added my massive movie library (1186 and counting) to Plex and as far as I can tell they all are working beautifully. I also added my music collection (4095 albums) and again it looks very nice and all seem to be working great. My problem is in the TV show category. When I added them some work and some don’t. Most showed up but a few didn’t even show up. The ones that showed up and don’t work just give me an error when trying to play. As I said I used to use iTunes so I just added my iTunes media folder to each category. I have made some work by reducing some of the folders (like Tv shows/Breaking Bad/Season 1/episode 1 to TV shows/Breaking Bad/episode 1. What am I missing?
Most all my files are m4v. I had them all formatted that way for iTunes. Here’s an example. All the Game of Thrones files work but none of the Breaking Bad files do. To me they are identical.
If you don’t change your file names as recommended by @eric_grau above you won’t get very far.
preparation for nonsensical embedded metadata:
Go to Settings - Server - Agents - Shows - TheTVDB
In there, grab the line ‘Local Media Assets’ with your mouse and drag it downwards, so it ends up being at the bottom of the stack of active agents.
Take the title as it is used on TheTVDB. If there is something in parentheses, take that too. If the title contains invalid characters (depends on your file system), like § : % *, simply leave them out.
Check the naming and the folder structure of your show. Name the top folder of the show exactly after the title on TheTVDB. No abbreviations. No additional subfolders. No aliases.
Name the episode files according to the above linked naming guide. Use the same title as for the top folder. Show's Title - s01e01 - additional info.ext (’- additional info’ can be left out)
After you corrected the naming and folder structure, perform the Plex Dance with all files for this show.
Changing file names for a whole tv show’s worth of files is quick and painless with Filebot
@catstide said:
Good stuff Otto. It may take me a while to sort through all that. So should I grab Filebot,rename the files with it then do the Plex Dance?
Your first experiments you should do by hand, just for the learning experience
But yes, in this order.
Filebot is a beast that needs a bit of learning too. Trying to do all at once (Plex, Filebot, Java etc.) can be a bit overwhelming. So start slowly.
Filebot Video tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-8Z1kzFLv8
Filebot is working like a dream. Haven’t had to do the dance yet. Am I good not doing it if it’s working without it? Or could I be corrupting something. Thanks a ton!
Make sure to use the {plex} naming schema in Filebot. It produces the Plex season/episode code s00e00 instead of the default 0x00 which often works in Plex too, but sometimes doesn’t.
Make sure to use the {plex} naming schema in Filebot. It produces the Plex season/episode code s00e00 instead of the default 0x00 which often works in Plex too, but sometimes doesn’t.
