Question about movies and tv in same directory

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 4.22.1
Player Version#:

What’s up guys? So I have a quick, what i feel like is and oddball, question. Ok, so I have my media broken down like this /movies /tv /documentaries and /kids. So, I’m just linking all of my documentaries into the documentary directory. Well, when I create my library in Plex, depending on what I set the library up as (movies, or tv) only some of the files are found. When I set it up as a movie directory, plex doesn’t see any of the tv series documentaries, and when I set it up as tv the opposite. If I set it up as “other videos” all files are recognized but not matched with any metadata or posters. What I have done to get around this is setup one library as tv, and one as movie, both name “Documentaries”. Basically, what I wanna know is is there any way around having to do it this way? Is it possible to only have one library that matches both movie and tv files correctly? Sorry if I did a horrible job explaining this… Ask me anything you need to.

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You can’t mix TV and movies in one library. The scanning agents are different, and the metadata comes from different databases.


What you can do is create a TV library and a Movie library with the appropriate media in each, then create a Collection to gather your documentaries.

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Yeah. This is the conclusion I have come to on my own. I don’t really mind having multiple libraries, I just really wanted to keep all of the files in the same directory. “/documentaries”. As I said above, what I’ve done is put all of the documentaries (tv and movies) into this directory, then I have created 2 seperate libraries. One as a tv documentary library, and one as a movie documentary library, and pointed both libraries at the same directory. Seems to be working fine. Just wanted to make sure there isn’t any sort of issue in doing it this way???

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I don’t do much with movies and TV in Plex, so I don’t know, but my instinct would be to not do that. I’d say, if you have any weird behavior, that’s the first thing I’d change in the process of elimination. :man_shrugging:

5

I hope this _doesn’t sound harsh but:

You can’t have movies and television series in the same directory and expect 100% perfect results.

  1. Some TV series names match movie names.
  2. Some TV shows are a “Made for TV movie” shown in pieces and published using episode notation.
  3. The original cast of a movie, which further spins off to be a TV series will often have a different cast – different metadata.
  4. All the dates will be different.

The Plex scanners may be good but there is a limit and mingling of the two types in the same directory is where it will all break

You can have:

/MediaLibrary/
   Movies/
      Movie1 (year)/
        Movie1 (year).ext
   TV/
      Name/
        Season 1/
          Name - S01E01 - pilot.ext

If you point your “Movie” type library at /MediaLibrary/Movies
and “TV” type library at /MediaLibrary/TV,

then technically you aren’t mixing them.

Make sense?

1 Like
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I’m not mixing movies and tv. I have separate directories for both of those. I’m strictly talking about documentaries. Some docus are in film format and some are 3 episode tv series or whatever. I have those mixed. Follow me?

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