App to Import and Download Series for Plex

by Rian

One of the automation self-hosting streaming aims to achieve is matching and fetching metadata. Plex handles both rather well and is quite forgiving with file names on average. I suppose the emphasis is on average. Plex divides medias into two major categories: films (or theater) or series (TV shows, and others). If Plex fails to match the existing files for series, it has to be done manually; at worst, it could be a grueling work to match the show, the seasons therein, and then the episodes therein.

Sonarr is an open source and free download manager and also a great importer of media files. The original aim of the project is to mimic DVR and download the episodes automatically — it works great in that department too. In my case, however, I highly recommend using the tool to import the “series” media you already own with Sonarr. It renames and tags the files automatically in ways Plex can parse properly. It helps greatly to manage large library.

This is a bit of tangent, but I never realized how much duplicates I had kept on my NAS until I ran them through Plex and Sonarr. Apparently I ripped my DVDs and Blu-rays multiple times, without knowing it’s already on the NAS. Some of them I own both copies of DVD and Blu-ray, so the ripped copies of DVD had to go into cold storage for safe keeping. As a caution, Sonarr doesn’t have overwrite protection. It will import and write over the existing files. So a mistake while importing (e.g. importing season 02 as season 01) could overwrite and leave blank for the whole season. Try not to make same mistake as I did.