Today, we're going to use Filebot to batch rename your Plex Media Server's TV
episodes. As we touched upon in a previous video, we'll follow Plex's best
practices for naming your files and folders.
Before you even start using Filebot, at a minimum, each episode has to have its
episode number in its name, and that number should match the one that's in
TheTVDB. Let's look at the Spider-man cartoon series that first aired in 1967.
The episodes, which are named, for example, "s01e01,"
are not named according to Plex's
guidelines, in that they simply reflect the season and episode. If you scan these
files without renaming them, it will work, as we saw in a previously published
video. The Plex agent would simply look at the title of the series and scrape
the information according to the "s01e01" file designation. However, if you want to
follow Plex's recommendation - and let me click on the name to start editing it -
you'll want to start with the series name - Spider-man - and in parentheses, 1967
space dash space s01e01 - and optionally at the end, you can add the title of the
episode, which is - if we look at the TVDB page in the background - The Power of Dr
Octopus - so let's add space dash space and "The Power of Dr Octopus."
But as you can see, it's going to be be very cumbersome to go through every episode
in every season to rename the files. So this is where the magic of Filebot comes
in. I'll go ahead and hit escape. I'm not going to rename it because I
want Filebot to rename everything. Let's go ahead and spin up Filebot. I'll go to
the Start button then hit Filebot.
The first thing you'll notice is that I'm using an older version of Filebot,
which is 4.7.9. The reason I'm using this version is because
my Plex Media Server is installed on Windows Server 2016, and I've had
problems - in fact, I haven't been able to get to the Microsoft App Store from
Windows Server 2016, and the store is where the latest version of Filebot
resides. Please keep in mind that I am using an older version as we continue.
But with that said, the mechanics of the process should still be the same for the
newer versions. The first thing you'll want to do is click on the Load button
on the left hand side of the screen, where the original files will be listed,
then click on the folder of the series, which is Spider-Man (1967). You don't want
to select the parent TV Shows folder. Just drill down to Spider-man, and double-
click it, and make sure that the folder is listed in the File name field - not the
seasons themselves, because once I click Open, Filebot will traverse down to the
season sub-folders and scan every episode of every season.
So the next thing you want to do is click on the Match button, and select TheTVDB.
What it's doing is going out to TVDB
and seeing if something matches my title. It returns a whole bunch of possible
matches, but if you hover over the first entry of Spider-man, you can see that
series is also known as Spider-man (1967).
So let's go ahead and select that, and
let's look at the returned results. We can see that it's matching up the season
and episode number, and it's filling in all the blanks with the renamed file.
If we want to strictly follow Plex's guidelines, we want the file name to be
something like S01E36, instead of 1X36. To change the format of the
renamed file, you'll want to right-click on the Match button, and select Edit Format.
Instead of the sxe format, I'm going to choose the s00e00 format.
When you click Use This Format, you'll see the renamed files immediately.
As you scroll down the list, everything stays synchronized in both the left and
right panes, so you can verify that the renamed files are correct.
Of course, you'll want to make sure that all the titles match the entries in the
TVDB for each season in the series.
Let's go back to Filebot and start the renaming process by clicking the Rename
button. I have Windows Explorer up in the background so you can see the renaming taking place.
And there it goes.
Now, you can verify in Explorer that all episodes have been renamed correctly.
So that's it. Now, you can scan the Spider-man folder into Plex as a TV show,
and it should scan everything without any problems.
I hope you enjoyed - Thanks for watching!