Night Gallery Episode naming (TheTVDB vs TheMovieDB::TV) (Default Order vs DVD Order)

[KzintiCmdr]

I am currently on a project to extract all the episodes from the Night Gallery DVDs and name them. Night Gallery hosted by Rod Sterling, is a horror anthology series that runs about 60 minutes. With in that hour Mr. Sterling will walk an art gallery and stop at a painting. Describe it as an introduction to a short story. each episode is generally 25 minutes. Some episodes will contain up to 4 episodes. For example a 60 minute episode on TV might contain 2 or 3 or 4 episodes in the program. to give a better example. The first Episode which ran for 90 minutes had the following short stories: "S01E01 The Cemetery", "S01E02 Eyes", "S01E03 The Escape Route"

Now that you have an understanding, I have decided to split each 60 minute episode into their own separate stories running roughly 25 min each. By doing this it allows me to select a story without having to watch the entire episode. Plex will not go to the specific story if I keep it all as 1 file. If you want to watch "eyes" and actually select that in plex, it will start at the beginning and play "the Cemetery" first, then "Eyes". In addition If you look at TVDB you will see this is how this show is curated as well. So I am now splitting MKV files to make things work correctly.

Now (wait for it) comes my question.

I am very meticulous in curating all my video files, and strictly adhere to Plexe's naming convention. With that in mind i am naming the files manually. the only think I want filebot to do is to move the completed files after i am done. When I hit Match (TVDB is default) the matches are absolutely incorrect. for example "S01E01 The Cemetery" might be actually "S01E09 The Cemetery" instead. Which according to TVDB is incorrect. I use TVDB as my gold standard for naming episodes and has been great in the past.

In an effort to correct the issue I went though all the data bases one at a time checking the names. until I came to the last one, where as if by magic the correct episode numbers and names matched. and i was able to move these out of the folder into the Night Gallery (1969) tv show folder.

This is easily reproducible by simply creating text files as such "Night Gallery (1969) - S01E01 - The Cemetary.txt", "Night Gallery (1969) - S01E02 Eyes.txt" (and so forth). Have File bot match those and you will see they do not match the TVDB site.

I am going to work more with this tonight This is true for the older 4.9 version as well as the 5.0 version. I upgraded thinking this issue was address in the new version.

[rednoah]

Please read the How do I organize files for Plex? guide. This will give you a primer on what is important.


Notably, Plex allows you to choose between TheMovieDB (default nowadays) and TheTVDB for episode information, and different episode orders, and file naming must match your chosen database and episode order, which is radically different in this particular case:

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$ filebot -list --q "Night Gallery" --db TheMovieDB::TV
Night Gallery - 1x01 - The Dead Man / The House Keeper
...
Night Gallery - Special 1 - The Cemetary / Eyes / Escape Route
...

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$ filebot -list --q "Night Gallery" --db TheTVDB
Night Gallery - 1x01 - The Cemetery
Night Gallery - 1x02 - Eyes
Night Gallery - 1x03 - The Escape Route
Night Gallery - 1x04 - The Dead Man
Night Gallery - 1x05 - The Housekeeper
...

FileBot will match primarily by SxE number, so if you match 1x01 you will get a different match depending on which database you have selected. That said, you have already chosen your database / order in Plex, so you must use the same database / order in FileBot, even and especially if that also requires you to manually fix matches to make the SxE numbers conform to your chosen database.

e.g. FileBot matches 1x01 correctly against TheTVDB / Aired Order episode information:

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$ filebot -rename *.mp4 --db TheTVDB -non-strict --format "{plex.id}" --action TEST --log INFO
[TEST] from [Night Gallery - S01E01 - The Cemetary.mp4] to [TV Shows/Night Gallery {tvdb-70382}/Season 01/Night Gallery - S01E01 - The Cemetery.mp4]

** if you choose TheTVDB / DVD Order episode information then you will get different results


Alternatively, you can match files by episode title. Please read FAQ #2 for details.

[KzintiCmdr]

Thank you for the reply.

I am acutely aware how plex wants to have its files named. To the point that if you put curly braces {} in the file name. This indicates to Plex to use meta data from a particular source. for example. If you use "Night Gallery (1969) {tvdb-70382} - S01E01 - Cemetary" it forces plex to use TVDB no matter how its configured on the server side. This is posted all over the plex forums and I would say 75% of the time, they are correct, the file name is wrong and its retrieving the wrong meta data.

In Plex, I spent 4 hours troubleshooting that issue. I finally have that working properly.

I had selected TheTVDB not TMDB (easily confused) and I was still getting mis-matches. The Matches that filebot were offering were way off. I had to go through all the data bases one by one until the matches were correct. It was very strange, as its not like FileBot to have matches that did not match the website. (For me anyway). My workflow goes like this.
Rip DVD. A folder is created by MakeMKV called S1D1
Several tracks in the folder will be like T00_(C1) ... T01_(D1) etc.
I open T00_(C1) to see what episodes are in that track. Noting the time when the first one ends.
then I will use Makemkvsplit (I think this is what its called) to split the file at the end of the first episode.
Then I will rename the split episode manually based on what I see on the TheTVDB database.
then I will rinse and repeat for the remaining tracks and episodes in the folder.
Then I will fire up fileBot (because I love how it moves the files after its done) remove all the files I don't want moved, then hit match.

I will select TheTVDB. The resulting match will be very different from the already correctly named files.
I finally got Filebot to show correctly matched episodes by closing file bot, then reopening filebot selecting a different database (the matches were not correct of course) rinsing and repeating until I got to the last database where the matches were correct, then I could move the files.

You have used the command line to show that filebot is pulling the correct information. Which it is, You see its the GUI that I am using not the command line. It was so surprising that filebot was not showing the correct meta data. I normally don't have a problem.

[rednoah]

Please post screenshots or files paths as text so that we can see what you are seeing and reproduce the issue.


Please read How to Request Help for details:

• Include Screenshots (absolutely required for new topics)
• Include file paths as text when reporting mismatches (press F7 to copy debug information)

Here's what I get with the previously suggested file names when matching against TheTVDB / Airdate Order which looks good to me and shows the same results as the command-line copy & paste test case above:






You'll want to double make sure that you have configured FileBot to match against Airdate Order and not DVD Order:

[KzintiCmdr]

Well this issue was definately self inflicted. I am blonde so that happens from time to time. I sat down and re-read the documentation and realized exactly what you were talking about. The upgrade may have messed with my preset. When I created a new preset my old preset would appear instead. When I expierenced this I steped aside and started watching the videos on how FileBot operates. Thats when I relized I was using the application incorrectly. I created a new preset from scratch whcih allowed me to rebuild how the files should be renamed. Beleive it or not it works like a champ. I named the preset "Episodes" so I will not get confused as to what preset I shold use. When I tried the preset, everyting was renamed exactly as expected. I used this string to get everything renamed properly.

My Preset string looks like this:

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X:/{n} ({y})/{'Season '+s.pad(2)}/{n} ({y}) - {s00e00} - {t}

and the resulting file name looks like this (from the example)

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x:/Night Gallery (1969)/Season 01/Night Gallery (1969) - S01E01 - The Cemetary

Which is exactly what I was looking for, the Matching database is set to TVDB just like everyone suggested. the Epsode order is "Air Date"

You know it really helps to read the documentation and watch the videos, I was using the program completly wrong which was the root cause of my problem.

I am not use to the Filebot interface and its interface is unusual compaired to normal windows applications and gets some getting use to.

What I mean by this is when you click on Presets, then click on edit presets, everyting changes colors but its not very intutive that you are then supposed to click on the preset you want to edit. I would have normall right clicked on the preset in the list and selected "Edit Preset" from a context menu. Both work and these are just some of the quarks I need to get use to with FileBot.

In the end, it just simply works (when used right)

Thanks again for all the help.

[rednoah]

You'll want to just use the {emby} format since that will give you want you want and take care of all the corner cases:

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X:/{ emby.tail }

e.g. {n} ({y}) will give you Perry Mason (2020) (2020) if n = Perry Mason (2020) and y = 2020 and that's probably not what you want:
viewtopic.php?t=12852


If you have time, your UI experience would be much appreciated:
viewtopic.php?t=10881


The Presets selection popup unfortunately can't itself have a context menu popup due to framework limitations. That said, right-click currently does nothing, so we can look into that. Then again, you don't really need Presets at all if you always use the same database / custom format for all your episode files.



EDIT:

FileBot r9678 now allows <Right-Click Preset> to jump directly into the Preset Editor for the right-clicked Preset item.

[KzintiCmdr]

I don't know if this is a bug or a change in how 5.xx.xx works, but I noticed recently that when you click on "Match" in the middle it does not prompt you for which database you are using. This may have been my root cause of the mismatches. I have seen in other YouTube videos from 3 years ago where you click on the match button and it then asks you which database you want to use. Understandably 3 years ago is ancient history, but I do seem to remember that FileBot did that, then stopped. I have adjusted my work flow by clicking in the rename box (the one on the right) and clicking on the database I want to use. or I will go to the bottom on the left and click on my preset which already has my preferred database selected.

There is so much to read in these forums it can make your head expload. It goes to show how well this software is supported.

[rednoah]

If you feel confused, please take a screenshot so that we can see what you can see at that point in time. That would add much needed context.


In general:
* If New Names is empty, then clicking the Match button will suggest to Fetch Data as there is nothing to match.
* If New Names is not empty, then clicking the Match button will align and match Original Files with New Names. This is typically the first step in Manual Matching if files don't already align in natural order.


Personally, I prefer Right-Click <New Names> but there are many ways to get the job done so that new users will somehow stumble onto at least one of them.