Hello,
I have set up folders for the several TV Shows that I watch. Each shows folder is labeled with the name of the show, then inside the folder is another folder for each season of the show. Within each of the season folders, the shows are named as so: Miami Vice S01E01. See the attached images to see what I am describing.
Unfortunately the automatic identification of the show and each episode fails for all of the shows that I expect for one: Perry Mason :)! Some of the Game of Thrones shows get identified as Perry Mason episodes
Any suggestions for fixing this problem will be gratefully accepted and appreciated!
get rid of the two stray videos in your main TV Shows folder! If these are tv show episodes, then they must go into their own folders structure. It doesn’t matter that you only have 1 episode of these shows.
If they are not tv show episodes, then they must go into a separate folder (and library) or into your ‘Movies’ folder.
your files don’t have 2-digit season numbers. Rename your files.
Verify that your tv shows library directly looks at your folder TV Shows. Not one or more folders up in the hierarchy of folders on your hard drive. (‘Edit’ the library, go to the ‘Add Folders’ tab to verify)
you are using m4v files. Those can have embedded metadata which often interfere with proper ‘matching’.
Do this:
Go to Settings - Server - Agents - Shows - TheTVDB
In there, grab the line ‘Local Media Assets’ with your mouse and drag it downwards, so it ends up being at the bottom of the stack of active agents.
Repeat the same under
Settings - Server - Agents - Shows - TheMovieDatabase
Settings - Server - Agents - Movies - Plex Movie
+
Settings - Server - Agents - Movies - TheMovieDatabase
After doing all of the above, perform the Plex Dance with one tv series at a time.
Honestly, if you have a file renamer like FileBot or similar, it would rename all the episodes for you. Usually the default naming scheme programs like FileBot use is one that Plex is happy with.
Given that FileBot is no longer free, I’m not sure what the best alternative is (besides just paying for a copy of FileBot). Maybe Ember Media Manager.
Here are the results of my endeavors based on your suggestions:
I renamed all of the episodes as suggested
I have verified that my tv shows library directly looks at your folder TV Shows.
When doing this suggestion: “Go to Settings - Server - Agents - Shows - TheTVDB
In there, grab the line ‘Local Media Assets’ with your mouse and drag it downwards, so it ends up being at the bottom of the stack of active agents.” I find that moving the ‘LocalMedia Assets’ to the bottom of the list does not stick. As soon as I leave the screen and return, the ‘Local Media Assets’ has returned to it’s previous spot. There is a checkbox for using or not using these assets so I have tried unchecking this box.
When following the steps to the “Plex Dance”, the step for “Clean Bundles” doesn’t do anything as there is no option in the server settings to force this cleanup.
The end result is that it appears as though most of the episodes are being made available in the Plex environment but none of the episode titles, content info, etc actually match the episode. For example, almost all of the episodes are shown as being a Perry Mason show, yet when clicking on any of them a Bosch or Game of Thrones or Miami Vice or whatever gets played. So it is not actually possible to know what TV show and episode that is being selected will be the one played!
So all-in-all no real improvement in using Plex to watch the TV Shows that I have.
Since all of these movies, music videos & TV Shows are stored on an external HD, my next attempt will be to remove all of the TV Shows from the HD and then add them back in one show at a time, in the hopes that the indexing will work correctly this time.
Interestingly enough, the “Movies” folder containing 80+ movies works perfectly! Perhaps the TV Shows one too after some more experimenting.
I am disappointed that the Plex app doesn’t work better, but perhaps it will at some point.
Thanks to all for your suggestions. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
For sanity purposes, double check a few files to make sure they actually are what they say they are. Got burned with a few mislabeled movies recently. Frustrating, but sometimes it CAN be that simple.
which web browser are you using? Try Chrome or Firefox instead of Safari
The LMA agent won’t stick at the very bottom of the list. But you should be able to make it the lowest of the agents which do have a ‘check mark’.
If you don’t perform the Plex Dance exactly like noted, it’s all for nought.
After all the changes, have you tried to envoke at library metadata refresh? That will force a full scan and download. I would highly recommend leaving the local media assets turned off unless you have encoded metadata to the files and have manually downloaded posters, art, etc and all that extra data is named and structured per the Plex conventions, otherwise the local assets can throw off otherwise legit data. I have seen local assets override higher priority items on the list. Turning off completely prevented that override. I usually use Chrome and still experience that priority change not being saved.
Don’t do it from this location!
This will re-download all metadata for all libraries.
Completely needless if your issue is only restricted to one library.
And a killer if you have a rather large collection of media.
Update.
I have moved all of the TV Shows out of the Plex library. And I have refreshed the library media info as well as cleaned the bundles.
The movies in the attached screen shot were all mislabeled as the TV Show “Blue Movies” and given different episode numbers. So I have moved the from the Movies library. Any suggestions as to why they were mis-identified and how to fix it would be appreciated!
I will start re-adding in the various TV Shows, one show at a time, and will hopefully be able to get them to be identified correctly!
Thanks to all for the suggestions!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Just curious, are you putting movies and TV shows in the same folder on the files system? The should be in separate root folders. Also, you should have separate libraries within Plex one for movies the other for TV shows and each library should have the correct type associated to that library. If this is setup correctly you will not get “TV Show” season/episode matches in a Movies library.
@BKKDavidby said:
The movies in the attached screen shot were all mislabeled as the TV Show “Blue Movies” and given different episode numbers. So I have moved the from the Movies library. Any suggestions as to why they were mis-identified and how to fix it would be appreciated!
@fusion_jeff is right. They’d never show up as a tv show if you had separated your movie files from your tv show files.
/media/Movies <-- movie library points here
/media/Series <-- tv show library points here
I was about to say that embedded metadata could be responsible, but if you already did step 4) from my first response above, then that shouldn’t be the case anymore.
You are using wrong file names for Lord Of The Rings. No abbreviations.
If you want the stacking to work, part 1 must be the very last part of the file name (except the file name extension .mp4 of course)
Alas, even though they were in the “Movies” folder, Plex was showing them under the TV Shows sidebar. What was interesting was that when I clicked on “info” for the “episode”, the info shown is correct, i.e. The movie’s title is listed and the path to get to it goes through the movies folder. Weird.
Thanks for the suggestions! I’ll keep you appraised of my progress
