"Renaming and Sorting" Organize by Season isn't 100% "Plex compatible"

Under Renaming and Sorting, the option “Organize by Seasons” states that it is, among other things, Plex compatible.
While that might be so, as this matches Plex’s folder structure, it isn’t compatible with Plex’s subtitle searching feature.
Plex Premium subscription holders using various Plex Players as well as the web version of Plex, look up subtitles for movies and shows which do not have them included in the library.
It looks each episode up in the following format:
series title - SxxExx - episode title
– essentially, it’s searching opensubtitles.org (as well as other sites?) for matching naming stings.
Plex does not appear to append the “s01e01 - title.mkv” with the series name.

NONE of the thousands of series filenames meet these criteria for Plex (I’ve been recording and collecting series for over a decade) include the series title in the episode filename.

  • side note: my collection did originally use the “series s00e00 title” format in the beginning of time, but when I transferred those titles to my (Windows Phone) the episode number and title were truncated so I couldn’t decipher which episode to watch next.
    Now things are different and I have family who requires subtitles/captions and they can’t look them up successfully.

So, to summarize, could you remove the Plex compatible notation from this Renaming and Sorting section?

The naming structure of the files is Plex compatible, what you’re saying is that when Plex is searching for subtitles from third party website is’ not using the same structure? Sorry I didn’t quite understand your point here. If the files being created by MCEBuddy are being recognized by Plex - what’s the issue?

Yes, Plex does find the series and episodes without the episode filename containing the series name, but it is not the recomended filename structure and by not including the series title in the begining of the name it can not be used with Plex’s search subtitle function.
Naming and Organizing Your TV Show Files | Plex Support

Standard, Season-Based Shows

Most television shows have episodes organized into seasons. To name season-based shows create files with the season and episode notation sXXeXX:

  • /TV Shows/ShowName/Season 02/ShowName – s02e17 – Optional_Info.ext

This is only an example. The most important bit in the file name is the appropriate season and episode number notation s02e17 which in this example means Season 2 Episode 17 It does not matter if you use dashes, dots or just spaces.

Thanks for reporting this. The file renaming structure for Organize by seasons has been updated to be compatible with the latest Plex specifications. You can download the latest 2.5.7 beta build and try it out.

1 Like

Thanks, I’ll download it tonight and give it a try.

The formatting works great, thank you. I appreciate your continued work and improvements.