Special chars in Media Scanner

[ZWOOKY]

Hello together, I’ve just moved successfully from plex-cloud to local server with plexdrive.

I got the following problem which wasn’t with plex-cloud before:

• Special characters in filenames will break the Media Scanner
  • ie: colon and slash and maybe many others.
  • No problems with filenames containing special chars from asia … cool it’s working

Most filesystems don’t support colons in filenames, but for the Scanner it’s important to find the movie in the database. I’ve some dirs with more than 8000 files and it’s not so easy to search for the wrong chars. I even wasn’t able to search for (), which I get when you year is defined. Google doesn’t allow to search for this. I’m replacing it with a placeholder before and then I’m looking for the year.

I’m not sure about the hex-value of the colon, but if plexdrive can change it on the fly, or the media scanner wan’t stop that would be an improvement.

Is anyone facing same problems and I’m doing something wrong or will it be a feature that the media scanner doesn’t stop on filenames with colon : and slash in names?

Thomas

[OttoKerner]

Just leave out the special chars in the file names. Don’t replace them with other chars.
The scanner should still be able to identify it, provided the file name follows the recommendations:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/media-preparation/

@ZWOOKY

I’ve some dirs with more than 8000 files

Sorry, that is sub-optimal, to say the least.
Having several thousand files in one single folder will definitely slow down operation of Plex.
I strongly recommend creating subfolders and use the ‘one subfolder per movie’ approach with movies.
Use the prescribed folder structure for tv shows.
Always go with a nested folder structure of Music > Artist > Album > Songs with your music.

Filebot for instance will automatically purge invalid characters in the course of its renaming.