This is something I’m running into currently. I was curious what automatic methods there are for IDing files and bulk renaming, organizing, and updating meta data existed.
I have reasonable collection of movies and TV shows to archive.
Trash guides and the arrs.
Sonarr does TV stuff and renames then to meet say Plex standards.
So my process is… Add TV show to sonarr use sabnzbd to download and sonarr moves and renames the show which then appears in Plex.
But like I said… Trash guides will get you sorted
Edit: it’ll be quicker in a lot of cases to download rather than rip
I second using sonarr/radarr, once imported it detects episodes and lets you one click rename to a specific format and folder organization.
If you don’t want any of the other features of sonarr/radarr (like having a way to filter and manage your collection to see what’s in what quality or from what release group, searching multiple indexers with a single search, being able to send a specific search result to a downloader and have it automatically imported and organized when complete, or have auto downloading based on requests using scoring rules that you set), then there’s also filebot which a lot of people seem to like and seems to be just for matching with online metadata and renaming.
But I haven’t tried filebot since I like the extra features and capabilities of sonarr/radarr. It makes it easy to manage several library folders like an archive for anything that’s been reviewed, is complete, and in a quality/codec that I’m satisfied with, and keeping track of currently airing shows in my active folder which is where I also keep auto downloaded stuff I haven’t reviewed.
How does Sonarr and Radarr detect what files are the correct episodes?
The same way filebot and any other tool does - the file needs to have some label, either an absolute episode number or a season + episode number. I’m not aware of any tool that is able to look at the contents of the video to figure out which episode it is visually without any information from the filename - but I’d be happy to be proven wrong because I would be impressed.
Sonarr/radarr does analyze the content somewhat but that’s just for gathering resolution, codec, HDR, audio languages, and subtitle information, which can all be added to the filename format for inclusion during renaming.
Filenames.
If your files aren’t named properly, fix that first.
If you have a bunch of random files and zero metadata, well, usually I just delete them. I could go through and identify each one manually, but it’s a lot less effort to just add things I want to watch to my download queue.
Like others said the arr stack is probably what you’re looking for. If you’re only looking to rename files sonarr will fill you in ! Look at the documentation, I only use sonarr to rename my local files !
Other thing to consider, is this cool github project TVMV which also renames the files but you need to register to create an API key from TMDB (its free and you can fill in dummy informations). But it’s less customizable. I’m only using it to rename files if their name is in a different language than English.
About metadata, I don’t know if there’s a bulk and recursive metadata editor and dunno if sonarr fills in the gap. However, mkvtool and bash scripting is probably going to be your tools here.
How I would go about it:
- rename your files with sonarr putting all the important stuff in the filename
- bash script with mkvtool to strip and copy portions of the title name and add them in the corresponding metadata field.
There’s probably a better way to stripe metadata from sites like
tvdbbut I’m not a dev so it’s totally out of my scope and knowledge.When I was getting content from mega, I used filebot to rename.
The paid version is $6 it’s absolutely worth it
RenameMyTVSeries is the simplest way to do it if you’re not using the *arr stack for downloading stuff
