Plex Filenaming Conventions

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tardyturtle

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Plex Filenaming Conventions

#1

Post by tardyturtle » Sun Sep 16, 2018 3:15 am

First off, Gary, I have to thank you again for all of your work with EPG123. I am going on a year of EPG123, and life has been much better this year compared to the frustrations prior to that :-)

I just upgraded to the latest version and noticed that you can now customize the format for filenaming. My setup is that I have a Ceton InfiniTV tuner (read: not supported by Plex DVR) and I would like for my recordings from Windows Media Center to be indexed by Plex. Unfortunately, Plex is very picky on the input filenames for indexing. For example, if indexing based on date Plex requires the date format as YYYY-MM-DD or MM-DD-YYYY, but WMC YYYY_MM_DD_HH_MM. If indexing by season and episode, Plex asks for files to be organized by show and season /ShowName/Season XX/ShowName - sXXeYY - whatever else you want in the file name; however, the closest you can get with the current renaming scheme in EPG123 with %Et is sXXeYY EpisodeName (without a hyphen after), and I don't think you can change the directory (though I'm not 100% sure if Plex fully requires separate directories for different seasons).

Is there a way to reformat the date portion of the filename so that it conforms to Plex's requirements so that Plex will sort the shows and seasons into their folders (rather than having to list the filenames using "Home Video" indexing mode?

Again, many thanks for putting EPG123 together--I think it is safe to say you have saved us all who are still using Media Center!
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Space

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#2

Post by Space » Sun Sep 16, 2018 12:22 pm

The filename is controlled by WMC. You can edit a registry entry to tell WMC how you want the file to be named (which I assume is what EPG123 is doing), however it is limited.

See this thread for more info.

You can see that there is no way to change the format of the date in the format string. %Dt is just replaced by the date in a static format. I know of no way of changing the format of the %Dt string.

The only way I know to get what you want is to use a third party program to rename the file after the show has been recorded.
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garyan2

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#3

Post by garyan2 » Sun Sep 16, 2018 5:16 pm

^ what @Space said. EPG123 cannot control the date/time format. It can only set if/where the date/time field shows in the filename.
- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io
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tardyturtle

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#4

Post by tardyturtle » Sun Sep 16, 2018 9:19 pm

That's how I figured EPG123 was doing it, but wasn't sure if there was any sort of workaround. Thanks!
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