Shows with good metadata, bad names

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

I’ve recently merged the content of two media libraries. For roughly three years I’ve used Plex, using the expected file name formats for TV shows. That’s fine. For many years prior I used iTunes Home Sharing, as that worked well for our mostly-not-tech household at the time. I’ve brought that old iTunes-hosted (not DRM) media into my Plex libraries. Movies are fine, but TV shows brought in from that old library aren’t showing.

iTunes had a great metadata editor. Metadata was saved to the video file (verified with ffmpeg). But filenames were generally set to the episode name and nothing else (not show name, season, or episode number). Plex seems to ignore these episodes. There are far too many to rename manually. I do have them in properly-named folders, including the year.

My current Plex settings for the Shows library is:
Scanner: Plex TV Series
Agent: Plex Series
Prefer Local Metadata is checked

How (if at all) can I get Plex to recognize these files by their metadata?

Alternatively, I could rename them all if a tool exists to help. I can likely write something to rename based on the metadata, but that would also take me a while to set up.

Server Version#: 1.41.5.9522

Thanks!

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You can’t as far as I know. Plex will use the embedded metadata for the title/summary/etc. once it’s scanned in (for MP4 files only), but to get it scanned in, the file name needs to indicate what season/episode it belongs to. If that can’t be found the file is usually ignored.

If the season/episode number is part of the metadata, I’d use Mp3tag (despite the name, it works with many metadata systems). It has ‘Convert > Tag - Filename’ feature that can rename your files based on that embedded data. Something like %tvshow% - S$num(%tvseason%,2)E$num($tvepisode%,2) - %title% would get them into a Plex-compatible SxxEyy format assuming those fields are set in the file.

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Thank you! mp3tag handled the renaming perfectly. Much appreciated.

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