New install and user here. I’ve got a network volume with my collection of media that’s organized hierarchically, that is, of the form:
/television/show_name/S1/episode1.m4v
The volume is mounted to the (Windows) machine and I can view the contents just fine with Windows File Explorer. I’ve installed the /television folder on the Plex server as a Library. I’d like to maintain this hierarchical view of my content, so I’ve selected Folders in the second pull-down on the Library tab. I can see my folder structure just fine, but when I click through to /television/show_name/S1, I get the message “There are no items in this folder.” If I select TV Shows instead of Folders, I see a bunch of cover art, but still can’t access my media.
Am I making some fundamental install error? What should I try next?
Are you saying that there is no way to display the folder structure as it is on the disk? If that’s the case, rather than going through the effort of renaming 3000+files I’ll probably just view that content with VLC instead.
The closer you adhere to the Plex documentation, the better Plex will work. Everybody pushes it a bit, but if you stray too far, Plex will have trouble recognizing and organizing the files.
Plex is rather strict with TV shows. You might get by without a show year, but that can cause problems with reboots (ex: Mangum PI, 90210, etc). Consider the sXXeYY format a firm requirement. The docs say it is the “most important” part of the file name.
You can try other naming conventions, and they might work. But at some point it will break, and the reply will be to follow Plex’s naming requirements.
There are many tools that can help with naming files. Filebot is popular. The free version of Tiny Media Manager works quite well. There are many others as well.
PowerRenamer in Microsoft Power Tools is helpful for simple renaming with pattern matches or regular expressions. It makes quick work of tasks such as adding a year to file names, removing undesirable text from multiple files, etc
Your task can be done in a couple hours. I regularly validate 10k+ episodes in short order.
Maybe after regularly spending time ‘validating episodes’, I could do it that quickly too.
The problem I have is that I don’t particularly want to change from how my library has evolved over the last ten years to Plex’s preferred format. So for now I’ll probably continue to use VLC to watch from my library, and revisit this in a few months, once I’m comfortable with the rest of Plex. Thanks for educating me as to what’s going on, though.
Plex’ TV show naming format is also widely supported by apps outside of Plex.
So this is no wasted effort, nor is it like painting yourself into a corner.
Plus, once you have your files in this consistent and non-ambiguous naming scheme, it’s a snap to change it automatically to a different format. For instance using one of the above mentioned software tools.
