Article Index

Libaries and Agents

TV Shows

The TV Shows agent uses https://thetvdb.com to retrieve metadata. It's well worth getting your head around how this works as it's the metadata which makes Plex so powerful.

When you save your TV Shows to your media drive, it's best to use the following format {Media Drive}:\TV Shows\{season title}\{season number}\{showtitle-S##E##-Episode title}.mp4 for example, E:\TV Shows\The big bang theory\Season 1\The Big Bang Theory-S01E01-Pilot.mp

 

You don't need to add the season sub folder, that just tidies things up sometimes - I have a mix of folders that use season subfolders and those that don't.

Movies

The Movies agent uses https://www.themoviedb.org. It works in a similar way, but the format is along these lines: {Media Drive}:\Movies\{movie title}\{movietitle (year)}.mp4 for example, E:\Movies\Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004).mp4.

A good tip for both of the above agents is to use the websites to find specifically how the agent is expecting to see the title. By having the filenames correct at stage one, you will have to do less fiddling around to get your metadata correct on your media server.

If the agent hasn't picked up the correct show/movie, you can do a manual search to apply metadata within Plex. Within a series or movie in Plex, you can click the ... button and select "Match" or "Fix Match". This will load a search window that will initially attempt to locate metadata using the agent. It will then display a list of possible matches with a rating of how confident it is with that match.
If nothing in the list of results is relevant, you can click the "Search Options" link in the top of that window and simplify the programme title (or make it match what you've found on thetvdb etc).

After sorting out a couple of fixes, this will become second nature and you'll get the hang of how to match your programmes with the correct metadata.

The circumstances where you'll probably need to do this is where two programmes share the same title. My son watches a children's programme called "The Deep". Naturally, this title is pretty common and initially Plex matched it with the wrong series. On thetvdb.com, I was able to go in and search to locate the correct series - "The Deep (2015)" and then search for this within the Plex "Fix Match" window.

As this was applied to the top level of the series, it works for anything else that is dropped into the same folder.

There are some shows that are less straight forward - Power Rangers, for example.
Here, to get the correct metadata, I had to go through the Power Rangers entry in thetvdb.com and find the correct series number that matched the particular series I was trying to match. In that case, I then had to rename all of the files to match that format. Power Rangers will most likely record with a title like "Power Rangers Dino Supercharge", which is a title that doesn't appear in thetvdb.com and needs to be changed to something along the lines of "Power Rangers\S23 Dino Super Charge\Power Rangers-S23E06-Forged Under Fire_edit.mp4" to work (note the lack of a series title in the first part of the filename).

This isn't a big deal for me as I tend to trim the start and end of recordings after they've been added to Plex, using MCEBuddy, so I just change the filename to the correct format as I save the output of that process and then delete the file with the wrong filename.