Noob here, and I have read several wiki, searches trying to find answer to my issue. I’m not being lazy for asking, but getting overwhelmed and hoping for guidance from experienced users.
Majority of my TV shows are not showing up in the library (and many are showing up in movies, but I’ll deal with that later). I wonder if the problem might be with the parent folder name. And, before I change every folder by hand, I’m hoping for confirmation.
I know that this SHOULD be easy, just name the folder the TITLE of the show. BUT, I binge watch, and so before starting to watch the next TV series I like to know how many seasons I will be committing to. It also helps me with organization on my hard drives, viewing in Win 7, and tells me if I am missing/awaiting any seasons. Therefore, I have named folders that show details at a glance.
examples:
TV shows/DOWNTON ABBEY S01-S06 (and each has a subfolder named Downton Abbey S01, etc)
TV shows/DEXTER S01-08 Complete
TV shows/HATFIELDS and McCOYS (2012) miniseries
TV shows/THE KILLING (2011) S01-04 480p
I could see that the “complete” or “miniseries” might cause the folder to not get read properly. Those folders are easily enough bulk renamed. I suspected that the MAIN culprit was that almost every folder has S01-XX in the name.
The first 3 folders are missing from my library but the 4th folder DID show up! That is what stumps me and makes me think that the grouped season specification (S01-04) is OK to keep. There is no info file in that folder to make it get noticed, but the files are all listed in the one folder without subfolders listed as S01, S01, S03, S04. Could it be that the year listing helped the scraper? Most of my TV shows folders do NOT have the year listed in the folder. That will be tedious to look up and add, but if it would enable my folders to be read while keeping my total #seasons list, I’ll do it.
The wiki on TV naming conventions says
Kodi requires each TV show to be in its own folder, and for each file to contain a pattern from which Kodi can determine the season and episode number (e.g. “S01E01”).
Folder name = Show title
File name = Season/Episode number
The folder name will be cleaned of commonly used strings, such as DVDRip, 1080p, x264, etc. before being passed to the scraper. If the year of release is included, this will be extracted and used by the scraper to assist in making a match.
I’m not sure what other “commonly used strings” are also cleaned since it only listed 3 strings.
AND, does an underscore make a difference in the folder name? Could I assume that would be cleaned? I do differentiate any x265.HEVC-PSA file folders with “_x265” because one of my other networked media players does not play those files. Also, sometimes I have listed the resolution with an underscore “_720p” but that should get cleaned unless the underscore messes that up. Again, just need to know before I go renaming all of the folders.
So, am I SOL with my added specifications on my folder names? If so, any suggestions to identify completed collections, miniseries, total # of seasons?
Using Kodi 16.0, Android TV box, networked with win 7, multiple external hard drives. Thanks for reading and any help appreciated.