Plex TV Series Naming with Year

[milopalmer]

It appears the TV Series first air year isn't automatically included in the {plex} binding. I'm wondering if this is on purpose or an oversight, given that Plex recommends including the year on the series folder and filename?

[rednoah]

It appears the TV Series first air year isn't automatically included in the {plex} binding. I'm wondering if this is on purpose or an oversight, given that Plex recommends including the year on the series folder and filename?

The Name (Year) recommendation refers to TV Shows where the series name literally includes the year in the official series name, thus making each series name / series folder name globally unique and unambiguous.

e.g.
* Doctor Who ➔ the name is "Doctor Who", the year is 1963
* Doctor Who (2005) ➔ the name is "Doctor Who (2005)", the name is not "Doctor Who", the year is 2005


If you want to enforce Name (Year) for all TV Shows (for better or worse, depending on your software and chosen database) then you can use {emby} instead of {plex}. {emby} just so happens to work the way you want by default.


If you are using a newer version of Plex, then you'll want to use {plex.id} to add the numeric series ID to each folder name, which is much more useful than Name (Year) for identification purposes.


Please read the {plex} format documentation for details.

[milopalmer]

Thanks for the emby tip!

Per Plex,

If you are using the “Plex TV Series” agent, you can optionally include the TMDB or TVDB show ID in the folder name to improve matching. If you choose to do that, it must be inside curly braces: ShowName (2020) {tvdb-123456}

Sounds a little different than your POV. Obviously if the ID is included, the year is redundant. Just thinking the blasic {plex} should include the year, as that seems to be the baseline.

[rednoah]

That likely depends on your chosen agent and agent version. Doctor Who (1963) explicitly does not work for any HTPC software that uses the folder name to search on TheTVDB. {plex} cannot be changed for this reason alone, but commonly used bindings changing their behaviour is generally frowned upon and so the argument for change would have to be very convincing.


The Plex TV Series agent is brand new (and it is unclear if it is based on TheTVDB, or TheMovieDB/TV, or both, or neither) and so it's possible that {plex} (in combination with your chosen database and language preferences) isn't perfectly optimized for that, and that perhaps {emby} works better for certain corner cases. But I'm not yet aware of any specific example file paths where that is actually the case.

[milopalmer]

I see your point. Sounds like nothing is perfect, but close enough most of the time. Thanks for the feedback!

[rednoah]

Sounds like nothing is perfect, but close enough most of the time.

Well, I'd say that {plex.id} is pretty perfect if you're using Plex and the new Plex TV Series agent so I'd go with that if you don't mind numbers in the file path. But please do report back if you actually run into any specific issues with one file or another.

[milopalmer]

Reviving this thread with a question about getting duplicate years in folders and filenames with the following expression:

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{n} ({y}){" {tvdb-$id}"}/{'Season '+s00}/{n} ({y}) - {s00e00} - {t} -...

Some shows include the year in title, such as Perry Mason (2020). With the above expression the output is Perry Mason (2020) (2020)... Is it possible to omit the redundant year while including it for all the shows that don't include the year in the show title?

[rednoah]

You can use {ny} and have FileBot take care of the Name (Year) pattern including all corner cases:

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{ny}

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Perry Mason (2020)

You can use the {emby.id} format to have FileBot take care of everything:

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{emby.id}

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TV Shows/Perry Mason (2020) {tvdb-363026}/Season 01/Perry Mason (2020) - S01E01 - Chapter 1

The Episode Bindings viewer is your friend: