Working With TV Episodes And iTunes

General Discussions
1

First, I am on a Mac, using Sierra as my OS for my PLEX media server.

I am trying to get PLEX to scan a folder in my library that I have TV shows / episodes in. I use iTunes for my music and movies.

The way iTunes structures their TV Shows, is it makes separate folder called “TV SHOWS” and just dumps all the files in there. Now, I have read in the knowledge base in PLEX that you need to have a folder structure of TV Show Name/Season/ and then the filers must be named as : Title - s01e01 in order for PLEX to recognize it and index into your PLEX database.

That all being said, and the above way that iTunes handles TV Episodes, the only way I able to get PLEX to recognize my TV seasons and episodes is to make a separate folder, make ANOTHER copy of the episode and put it in the new folder. Make a PLEX library and point the scan directory string at that folder. Works great. The only problem being that I now have 2 copies of my TV shows, one for iTunes and one for PLEX

Is there any way I can get PLEX to read the TV Show iTunes folder structure, and be able to only have one copy of a TV episode?

I have actually tried making an Alias of the file and pointing the PLEX library to that, but it doesn’t read or recognize the TV episodes.

Any help offered would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read

2

I used to use iTunes to manage my rips too. There is an option somewhere in the preferences for iTunes to “keep library organized” or something like that. If you uncheck that box, iTunes will use the structure as you want it to. I would suggest reorganizing to Plex’s standards as it is the most strict. The grouping inside iTunes will be done by the embedded metadata, assuming these are mp4’s. I painstakingly added metadata using Subler to all my content when I was using iTunes.

Once you are organinzed, then add that folder to iTunes manually. This way you only have one file in both programs. Be sure not to purchase iTunes tv shows/movies with the intent to use in Plex, DRM stops that.

3

Thanks for your answer hatflix

I did consider your suggestion about unchecking the box in iTunes, but then for the 6 plus gigs of media I have would become unorganized on the iTunes end of things for my library … I kind of married iTunes many years ago (for many different reasons), and so changing now would be a HUGE amount of work … I was just wondering if there was a way I could get PLEX to read the iTunes structure and only have the one copy of the media file that both PLEX and iTunes could use.

Would anyone else have any suggestions?

Thanks so much again for your answer and time Hatflix