Emby Naming Convention for Movies and TV Shows

Emby scrapes by folder hierarchy

Emby understands your files as library → movie / series → season → episode. Get a level wrong and identification goes wrong with it; the classic symptom is one show split into several “unknown series”.

Movie library structure

• One folder per movie, named title (year) — that is where Emby reads metadata from
• Flat files work too, but sidecar images are less reliable than in a folder

                      Movies/
└── Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)/
    ├── Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).mkv
    ├── poster.jpg
    └── fanart.jpg
                    

TV library structure

• Season folders are literally Season 01 / Season 02
• Specials go in Season 00 as S00E01
• Multiple versions of one episode can use a “- version” suffix

                      TV Shows/
└── The Bear (2022)/
    ├── Season 01/
    │   ├── The.Bear.S01E01.mkv
    │   └── The.Bear.S01E02.mkv
    └── Season 02/
        └── The.Bear.S02E01.mkv
                    

Debugging a failed scrape

• Check the hierarchy: is the show under show (year)/Season xx/?
• Check the filename: is it SxxExx, and free of release group noise?
• Check the library type: was it created as Movies instead of TV Shows?
• Check metadata providers: can the TMDB / TVDB plugins reach the network?
• If all of the above is correct, run the folder through VRenamer and re-scan

Batch-fixing existing filenames

VRenamer talks to your media folders over SMB or WebDAV, reads TMDB data and writes naming that Emby understands, aligning subtitle files at the same time. Afterwards, run a library scan in Emby and metadata comes back correctly.