TV Episodes are being added all over the place, in wrong series... or not added at all

General Discussions Plex Features
1

Server Version#: 1.13.9.5456
Player Version#: 3.69.1
Server OS: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
Media Folder Locations: Synology DS1817+

Over the last few months, I’ve started to notice that TV episodies are getting put into the wrong series, and series are being classed as different series… This is mostly happening with the following TV Shows:

  • Supernatural
  • Gold Rush
  • 9-1-1

For an unknown reason, Gold Rush and Supernatural are being lumped together and some seasons in Supernatural are showing Gold Rush season information and has both Supernatural episodes and Gold Rush episodes.

For 9-1-1, this TV show fails to show, even though I have all the .nfo files and metadata in there… I’ve looked at my folder names, the NFO files, filenaming, everything I can think of and I jus’t cant figure out what the problem is, so I’ve finally decided to post here for help.

All my media folders are located on a Synology NAS, shared and mounted on my Ubuntu media server using FSTAB and on this server I also have Sonarr, Couchpotato and SAB running. The folders are mounted with full rwx access (777).

I have different shared and mounted folders for TV and Movies.
My TV series are in different folders
All seasons are in the above folder, I do not seperate seasons by folder.
TV Show folder names are in plain text, using spaces where appropriate, IE:

  • Gold Rush
  • Supernatural
  • 9-1-1
  • 12 Monkeys
  • and so forth

TV Episodes are named as per plex requirements, IE with the appropriate .NFO file named exactly as the episode:

  • 9-1-1.S01E02.Let.Go.1080p.AMZN.WEBRip.DDP5.1.x264-NTb-postbot.mkv
  • 9-1-1.S01E02.Let.Go.1080p.AMZN.WEBRip.DDP5.1.x264-NTb-postbot.nfo
  • Supernatural.S14E04.PROPER.720p.HDTV.x264-CRAVERS-BUYMORE.mkv
  • Supernatural.S14E04.PROPER.720p.HDTV.x264-CRAVERS-BUYMORE.nfo
  • Gold.Rush.S09E01.Declaration.of.Independence.720p.HDTV.x264-W4F-Obfuscated.mkv
  • Gold.Rush.S09E01.Declaration.of.Independence.720p.HDTV.x264-W4F-Obfuscated.nfo

I’m unable to figure out why Plex keeps lumping Supernatural and Gold Rush together, TVDB has them split and no problems there…

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a media limit in Plex before the DB gets to big and hard to manage, but I have a lot of media… Hoping this isn’t the issue, but below is the stats

  • 191 TV Series, 7,078 episodes (all 720p and 1080p) - 7.66TB
  • 666 Movies (all 1080p) - 3.59TB

Would appreciate any help or pointers to help me get this fixed.

Thanks!

2

Plex doesn’t use ´.nfo` files.

That’s a mistake, particularly if you’re having issues with matching.

Which folder is added to your library? I hope it is a kind of top level ‘Series’ folder, which then holds the folders for the different tv shows.

You can add several folders to the tv show library. Just make sure not to spread out the episodes of one tv show over several folders. Keep them together.

Here is the quasi-official guide:

  1. Look up your show on TheTVDB
  2. 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.
  3. 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. Add the (year) in parentheses when episode 1 of season 1 of this show was aired.
  4. 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)
  5. After you corrected the naming and folder structure, perform the Plex Dance with all files for this show.
3

Interesting and good to know… but I have updated some NFO files for descriptions and have seen the changes take place. I can truy this for the TV shows I’m having problems with and see if that helps.

Yes, I only have 1 folder added for my TV shows, the top-level folder - There are no other foldes added. I have tried added the 9-1-1 TV folder, but it still won’t add that show to my library.

Thanks for the guide, my naming and structure is prety much identical except I don’t use spaces, but rather periods (.) in placer of spaces in the MKV files only… The TV Shows folders do use spaces when appropriate. I don’t place the year on the episodes, never had to over the 6 years I’ve been using plex - is the guide suggesting only on S01E01 or for all episodes?

Lastly, thanks for the very fast reply, I was shocked to see one come in so quickly.

4

Mainly on the show folder names. They are very important for the plex scanner.
The year, when S01E01 was aired.

I doubt it. As I’ve said above: Plex doesn’t use those nfo files - at all.
Unless you have a 3rd party agent installed.
.nfo importer agents

5

You need a season folder

6

So I jsut created a season folder for 9-1-1… Tried two different methods:

First Naming was like so:

/tv-new/
     /9-1-1/
           /Season01/

And plex matched the TV show as “White Collar”…

Then I changed the season folder name to “Season 01” and Plex matched it as “The Ellen DeGenerous Show” :thinking: - really?! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

/tv-new/
     /9-1-1/
           /Season 01/

So finally going on @OttoKerner advice on adding year, I named the folders like so:

/tv-new/
     /9-1-1 (2018)/
           /Season 01/

And now the TV show comes up, awesome!!
Then I added the year to Supernatural and Gold Rush… AND… They are all showing properly!!! Such an easy fix, awesome again.

Now… what do I do with all my other series where I don’t have season folders… Are you guys aware of a script/app I can use to do this for me? :blush:

Thanks for all the quick help, really appreciate it!

7

FileBot can both rename and create Plex’s required folder structure. There is a “Plex” format string that does it all. It will rename the files correctly by Plex’s standards and put them in the correct structure.

Disclaimer: I have never used FileBot to create the Plex folder structure as I just use it for renaming but there are a lot of folks that use it regularly and there are even people here that worked with the FileBot people to create the “Plex” format string.

8

Love it, thanks for the suggestion, I will give it a go for sure!!

Thanks again, I’ll try it out on some other smaller series and see how it goes…

Last question… when I rename these files and have to do a rescan, will it affect my ‘played/unplayed’ status on the episodes?

9

Only if they have been mismatched before.
If they were correctly matched, they will retain all the watched/unwatched status.

10

Perfect, thanks!

11

You will need to rescan and you may need to “Plex Dance” the whole series and that usually resets the watched status.

. . . . . . . .
When you change anything to fix a match it is a good idea to “Plex Dance” the files involved:

1 - Move the media to where Plex cannot see it
2 - Refresh the library
3 - Empty Trash
4 - Clean bundles
5 - Move the series back
6 - Refresh the library

Perform all steps in order and allow each one to finish before starting the next.
. . . . . . . .

12

“Plex doesn’t use ´.nfo` files.”

Yes, it does? You helped me with one movie which had the wrong imdb-link in the .nfo. After that, it scraped correctly.

Now TV-Shows doesn’t seem to use the .nfo files, unfortunately.

13

That applies only to the scanner which looks for the IMDb number.
But that is all. And as you have already learned, it applies only to movies.
Every other piece of metadata will either come from the file’s embedded metadata or from online metadata sources.

But nothing else will be read from the .nfo (except when you install the .nfo importer agents)

14

Sure, it only applies to the scanner. But as I understand it, OP had problems with the scanner and your response was that “Plex doesn’t use ´.nfofiles.”. You could read that and think that "Plex doesn’t use ´.nfo files" (ever).
I have seen plenty of people state that.
Plex doesn’t use ‘.nfo’ files for TV-Shows, sounds better.

PS. Is there an official resource to find that the movie scanner is using .nfo files for scanning?

15

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