How to Bulk Rename Movie and TV Files for Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, and Kodi

Media servers match your files to metadata mostly by their names and folders. Get the naming right and Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, and Kodi identify almost everything automatically. Get it wrong and you fight wrong matches, missing artwork, and duplicated entries forever. Here is a naming convention all four scan reliably — and a safe way to apply it across a large library without wrecking it.

Why file names decide your metadata

A library scanner does not watch your movies. It reads the file name and the folder around it, guesses a title and year, and asks a metadata provider for the match. Clean, predictable names give it an unambiguous question and it answers correctly. Vague names — no year, extra tags, inconsistent separators — force it to guess, and that is where wrong posters and mismatched episodes come from.

The movie naming convention

One movie per folder, with the release year in parentheses, and the folder name matching the file name:

Movies/
  Movie Title (Year)/
    Movie Title (Year).mkv

A concrete example:

Movies/
  Interstellar (2014)/
    Interstellar (2014).mkv

The year matters more than anything else here — it is what separates a remake from the original. If you keep multiple cuts, give each its own clearly labelled file rather than dropping two videos in one folder.

The TV show naming convention

Group by show, then by zero-padded season folders, with SxxExx in each episode name:

Shows/
  Show Title (Year)/
    Season 01/
      Show Title (Year) - S01E01 - Episode Title.mkv

For example:

Shows/
  The Office (2005)/
    Season 01/
      The Office (2005) - S01E01 - Pilot.mkv

Zero-pad season and episode numbers (S01E01, not S1E1). Put specials and extras in Season 00. For a file that contains two episodes, use a range: S01E01-E02.

Common naming mistakes that break scans

• No year. Remakes and same-named titles collide onto the wrong entry.
• Extra tags and inconsistent separators in the file name that give the matcher more to trip over than to work with.
• Multiple movies in one folder, which scanners routinely merge or misread.
• Episode numbering that does not match the provider's ordering — a frequent problem for long-running shows and anime, where absolute numbering and seasonal numbering diverge.

Renaming a whole library without breaking it

Doing this by hand across thousands of files is exactly where libraries get wrecked. A careless batch rename orphans artwork, subtitles, and watch state, and there is no undo. A safe rename follows three rules:

1. Preview every change before it touches disk. You should see the full before/after, not run a rename and hope.
2. Keep sidecars with their media. Subtitles, NFO, and artwork have to move alongside the file they belong to.
3. Keep a journal. A bad pass should be one rollback away, not a weekend of manual repair.

MetaTana does exactly this: it proposes a clean, server-friendly layout, shows you the diff, moves sidecars alongside each title, and journals every write so a rename is reversible. It does not modify the media itself — it organizes files, writes NFO, artwork, and sidecars beside them, and tells your server to rescan.

After you rename

Trigger a library scan or refresh on your server. With clean names in place, matches, posters, and episode data should fill in automatically. If a few stubborn titles still miss, that is a metadata-cleanup job rather than a naming one — see the per-server guides for Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, and Kodi.