TV Shows vs. Movies

General Discussions
1

what is the difference between a TV Show and a Movie?

I ask as I am importing my DVD library into Plex. I have the Gilligan’s Island and Classic Beverly Hillbillies on DVD. The Gilligan’s Island DVDs are imported as Movies, with single file per disk, with each file containing several episodes. Plex seems to recognize them fine. I have 18 episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies, have imported them as Movies, and Plex only recognizes 33% the files (6 out of 18). When I attempt to import either of these as TV Shows, Plex does recognize them at all - no files found of said type, or some such message upon library creation.

Any ideas as to why this may be happening, and what I can do to fix it? Does this have to do with my file system structure? I wouldn’t think so, but not sure of anything at this point. Also, I have just added the HD HomeRum Prime - which requires a TV Show library to store DVR recordings. Again, not sure what impact that would have.

is there a specific log file or setting - my settings/Plex configuration are default from installation, I should be looking at for clues?

Also, worth note, I have imported about 100 movies, and likely 500+ Music CD’s without any issue whatsoever.

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

2

Movies and TV Shows are fundamentally different.
Movies are usually one-off affairs.

TV Shows (in Plex, these are always ‘series’) always have several ‘episodes’ which are usually to be watched in a certain order.
Plex will track your progress through a series and will offer the next episode to watch.

Because of that, series require both a different file organization and a different source of metadata.

see https://support.plex.tv/articles/#cat-media-preparation

3

TV Shows & Movies need to be in separate libraries so that when Plex looks up details to download the metadata it looks in the correct database.

Incidentally just because a show was on TV does not mean it’s a TV Show as the powers that be at thetvdb.com (where Plex pulls data from) have decreed that TV Shows must have more than one episode so they don’t catalogue one off dramas or documentaries. So a 2hr drama is a movie even if it never gets shown in a movie theatre & even if it’s subsequently shown in two one hour episodes it is a still a Movie not a TV Show.

4

Ok - I guessed that it (the difference between a TV Show and a Movie) had something to do with the database from which the media information/metadata was being pulled - and I also understood that just because a movie or some other program/media was on TV, did not make it a TV show.

Something a little different seems to be going on here…

Several years ago, I bought a two disk set of the Classic Beverly Hillbillies - with each disk having 8 episodes. I converted these episodes - individually, into MKV files using Handbrake. I also had bought two other disks of the Beverly Hillbillies with one episode each - bringing the total to 18 episodes.

All of these episodes/MKV files were places in the same directory. All of them are named “Beverly Hillbillies-xx” where xx is a number between 1 and 18. Sizes of these file range from 1.3GB to 2.1GB.

When creating the library, when I created it as a TV Show library…well…I got nothing. So, I created the library as a Movie library. When the library was first created, Plex recognized 18 files of the appropriate type in the library, but…as it started to try to located the metadata for these episodes, 12 of the files disappeared, leaving only 6 episodes in the library. What is stranger yet - at least to me - is that there is seemingly no pattern to the episodes that remained (1,2,3,5,7 and 16) and the ones that disappeared. Episode 1 was on its own disk, as was Episode 2, Episodes 3,5 & 7 were on another disk, and Episode 16 was yet a different disk.

Now, clicking on the 3-dots in the lower-right corner of “Episode 1”, and selecting “Get Info”, all of the missing episode files are listed - along with the file for Episode-1. If all these files were concatenated into a single library entry, the entry would be several hours long. But, the listed running time is 25 minutes. All of the other files/episodes appear to check in at a running time of 25 minues as well.

Is there anyway to “pry” the other files out of episode 1, and let them be “re-discovered”? Not sure what the answer is here, but this strikes me as strange and somewhat random behavior.

5

@sfischer1967 said:
All of these episodes/MKV files were places in the same directory. All of them are named “Beverly Hillbillies-xx” where xx is a number between 1 and 18.
Now, clicking on the 3-dots in the lower-right corner of “Episode 1”, and selecting “Get Info”, all of the missing episode files are listed - along with the file for Episode-1. If all these files were concatenated into a single library entry, the entry would be several hours long.

The naming schema you used was incorrect for a tv show in Plex, so no surprise it didn’t work in a tv show library.

And adding a tv show into a movie library won’t work either. Because as you have seen Plex will very likely treat some of the files as ‘versions’ of what it assumes is the ‘main movie’.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200381043-multi-version-movies/
Or it assumes you have a movie consisting of several files, which only works up to a handful of files - if at all.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200264966-naming-multi-file-movies/

##The way forward for you is to:
Create a folder structure as required for tv shows.
Rename your files as per the Plex requirements for tv shows.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220687-naming-series-season-based-tv-shows/
Look up the season and episode numbers for your particular episodes here:
https://www.thetvdb.com/series/the-beverly-hillbillies/seasons/all

Once you are finished with renaming, copy the whole structure into your tv show Plex library.
i.e. no spreading out of the show over several disks.

6

First, let me say thanks.

Second, I really like Plex - for my first starting to use it about 3-5 months ago. Really, really an awesome (and pretty polished) product.

I’d have to characterize this as a flaw - at least to my way of thinking. File system/directory structure should - again, to my way of thinking, be flexible enough to overcome behavior such as I displayed.

but now at least I understand how it works - and it’s up to me to adapt.

Thanks again