THE SECRET TO A PERFECT media server isn’t just the creation of files that play nicely with all your streaming devices. All good media servers, including Plex and Jellyfin, perform what’s known as ‘media scraping’ of online databases such as TheTVDB to furnish you with all the metadata you need—title, episode, synopsis, cast, rating, and so on.

In most cases, this process can be done automatically—all you need to do is correctly name files and place them within the specific folder hierarchy. In this tutorial, then, we’ll first look at how to both quickly and easily rename and organize your files to make them identifiable to your media server. We say ‘most cases’, of course, and while your media server can effortlessly handle the bulk of your movies and TV shows, there will be a few exceptions. For example, if you have collected a lot of supplementary material, such as featurettes, deleted scenes, trailers, and so on, then you will need to tag this content manually.

While you could do this using your media server’s own tagging tools, in the second part of this tutorial, we’ll reveal a better, long-term solution that not only makes the job easier but ensures your media libraries look their best now and in the future.

–NICK PEERS

1 MOVIE FOLDER STRUCTURES

The good news is that media servers, including Plex and Jellyfin, support the same folder structures, allowing you to switch between them more easily. Let’s start with movies. While you can simply store movie files directly into a single library folder, if you create a dedicated folder for each one you can store supplements alongside it. Look at the following structure:

Movie Title (Year)

\ Supplement Type

>> The Supplement Type subfolder can be one of the following (not case sensitive): Behind The Scenes, Featurettes, Deleted Scenes, Interviews, Trailers, Shorts, Scenes, or Other. Any files stored inside these will show up on the movie’s own page under Extras listed under their filename (with the supplement type beneath) and an automatically generated thumbnail image. No additional tagging is required as supplements don’t get their own page—clicking one simply plays it.

2 TV FOLDER STRUCTURES

Things are slightly more complicated for TV shows, but only by the addition of season-level folders. Here’s a basic breakdown of what’s available:

Show Title

\ Specials

\ Season 1

\ Season 2

\Supplement Type

>> Both Plex and Jellyfin allow you to insert supplements at one of two levels: Specials is for global supplements, and any files placed here either require being matched to a corresponding entry on thetvdb.comor manually tagged, as we’ll see later.