showstroubleshooting

Troubleshooting

This section will help give you some leads to follow if you are having trouble getting MC to play nice with a sloppy media collection. It will be most useful to users new to MC, but may also be helpful when new media is acquired.

Contents:

Show Names
Regex

[Show Names]

The name of the show needs to exactly, or as near as possible, as it appears on TVDb.
Examples:

• Star Trek TNG will not return Star Trek: The Next Generation but Star Trek The Next Generation will.
• Nip/Tuck should be Nip Tuck
• Alice vs. Alice (2009). Remakes and shows sharing the same name will be the only time the year should be included, and usually only for the later ones, not the original.

This applies to anywhere the name of the show appears in the file path of the episodes.
Example:

D:\Shows\Star Trek The Next Generation\Season 1\Star Trek TNG S01E08 - Justice.avi 
_or_
D:\Shows\Star Trek The Next Generation\Star Trek TNG Season 1\S01E08 - Justice.avi 

Either of these paths, or combination thereof, will recognize the show but may cause problems recognizing the episodes correctly, especially since there are other Star Trek Series. To address this problem, the paths can be edited to the show name is uniform throughout, or by excluding the show name from the season and episode.
Example:

D:\Shows\Star Trek The Next Generation\The Next Generation Season 1\The Next Generation S01E08 - Justice.avi 
_or simply_
D:\Shows\Star Trek The Next Generation\Season 1\S01E08 - Justice.avi 

Regex

Regex, or Regular Expression, is the method used to extract the season and episode numbers from the file path of each media file. The Regex section under the TV Perferences tab can be very useful for both identifying a problem, as well as attempting to fix it.

Sometimes episodes of a show refuse to appear in the main browser, or you may see a WARNING in the log that the series and episode numbers cannot be extracted, but not to worry, they can checked manually and this may give you some insight as to what the problem is.

By copying the file name into the Test String box, you can test it against any of the Regexs to see if it is recognized properly. If it is, you can also try copying the entire file path into the test box to see if it's something in the name of one of the containing folders that's causing the conflict.

If the problem is that the naming convention used doesn't match any of the Regexs then the problem can be addressed by editing the file names or folder names, but this could be a painstaking process, especially if it's more than a single season.

Fortunately a custom Regex can help with that too, as long as the episodes are still organized by season.
For more information on custom Regexs, take a look ate the full Regex page.