It’s absolutely unconvenient and waste of time and hdd space. You must copy the seeds to other directory and bother yourself with specially named directories and filenames, for the series to be imported into database.
I just can’t believe it’s that way, such a good program with a huge obstacle? I must be missing some setting. It’s actually a deal breaker for me, Emby is hell, but this one “feature” of Plex is so senseless I’m appalled.
Thank you
Plex has some flexibility with naming/file structure, but there are other parts of the naming/file structure where there isnt any. The root cause of that is the file scanner/file matcher algorithm. With a standard format you have near zero issues, as you start to scale up support for different naming schemas the complexity of the scanner code grows nearly exponentially. Which then in turn starts to radically slow down the performance of the scanner.
Also with what you are doing it is not something plex was structured for. Not going into it though. But when you need to add media to plex you dont start the download in folders plex can see, once the media is on the drive you have plex monitoring then you move the files to the correct location, otherwise plex will attempt to read a partial file, and not process it correctly.
Well, it has to be fully flexible and to even look into files if they are named incorrectly trying to find out what it’s all about. I regard that as a core feature. I just can’t believe that it even didn’t recognized and indexed fairly correctly named files of episodes like Severance S01E1 .mkv until I made Severence/Season 01/ directories and moved all the files to it. That is just insane and I don’t see a problem if scanner is like 100x slower than it is, but it gives its best effort to index correctly. Still can’t wrap my mind around it, Plex really really needs a change in core and most important principle that is indexing files.
I don’t want to have scripts for moving the files. I don’t want scripts to copy files (it’s a waste of space), I just want to watch files right from where they are seeded.
Not really, for your example, which show is it? is it the 2014, 2019 or 2022 TV Series called Severance ? At a minimum Plex or any media management program needs to group files by show, and have a way to identify both the season number and episode number.
Having all of your files into a random root folder is a cluster F%^&*(. I dont use season folders, and have zero issues with plex scanning/indexing them. For those who do what you do, look up Sonnar, it will allow you to get a standard naming schema.
It doesn’t even matter if it didn’t recognize it correctly, that’s why we have a browsing through folders where files should be displayed no-matter-what, and then we can manually tell Plex what series it is. That’s how Emby works for example, you don’t chop your hair off asking youself why it won’t show me files that are sitting there?
I’m not having my season files in some random folder, I have it in something like /media/data/videos/series/Series Name/, and that is fully sensible and expected, and I do respect Plex to respect that. Philosophy of indexing here broken and the way it indexes is one of the most important core principles of media server, it has to be more flexible and tolerant, messing with after-download scripts that are copying files is just insane.
Says who? The devs and everyone else who uses plex disagrees with that statement. Plex is not a file manager, “Browsing” thru folders isnt something plex is designed for. Without seeing your file naming schema and your server logs I cannot debug your problem with specifics, but I can tell you from what you have implied, those file names tend to SUCK. I dont “copy” files. Once I have media from a source, IE ripped from a DVD, I run it thru a standard file renamer which then moves the files into a standard structure and naming schema. Using a demo library here is what I have for the first season of the 2022 show:
+---Severance {tvdb-371980}
¦ Severance - 01x01 - Good News About Hell.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x02 - Half Loop.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x03 - In Perpetuity.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x04 - The You You Are.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x05 - The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x06 - Hide and Seek.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x07 - Defiant Jazz.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x08 - What's for Dinner.mp4
¦ Severance - 01x09 - The We We Are.mp4
Not the exact standard naming schema but close enough for plex to scan without any issues.
Says an advanced middle-aged user (“a father and a husband” :)) which is developer/administrator himself and someone who witnessed personal computers evolution from the beginning of 80ies.
Renaming files? Unacceptable. You cannot seed them afterwards then.
Software is all about making your life easier and convient. Plex is not making my life easier on this one.
Then go find a product that supports illegal file sharing then. Plex is not one of those products, nor will you find many main stream solutions that last long in that market.
and besides its not plex’s fault the people who made your torrents cant name things properly in the first place
Sorry guys but you’ve gone full on hypocrisy here. And in reality your HDDs are full of pirated media. Can’t even start to explain how wrong is this.
And who is supposed to be standardizing such stuff? Maybe your average pirate?
Guys, don’t be hypocrites. 99.99% of your customers are getting their media for free.
But OK, I get it. To stay in the corporate game, you just have to take this broken hypocrite stance about it all. One of the gatekeepers of The Matrix.
And Chuck, since I can’t reply anymore in private messages, I want to just ask you is there any other use case?
Anyone who rips their CD/DVD collection, audio book CDs, music CDs, or has any kind of custom content. There are other ways to acquire legal content, but I dont feel like giving you a 2 hour lecture.
Plex has it’s naming guides here:
Above must be followed in order for Plex to work properly
As others has mentioned, that also goes for other media solutions out there, like: TV Naming | Emby Documentation that you’ll find very similar to Plex way of doing it
The use case provided by OP is not something Plex will consider, and will as such close this thread
