I haven't noticed this issue any more than Plex, seems to be more about having all the files in a clear folder for a show/season than the specific individual file names. But YMMV

Yes. This is the flaw in Jellyfin that makes it a non-starter for me. One time I spent like two hours updating all the metadata, and then some strangely worded button reset it all. Haven't used it since.

>then some strangely worded button reset it all

"Reset universal entropy"

If you categorize your libraries into their correct directories (i.e. TV into TV, movies into movies), then no.

Their metadata lookup is quite solid.

Will give it a try, thanks

Not if:

* they already have peer filename.nfo files with TVDB | IMDB | TMDB ID's

* not if they have scene standard names AND are not ambiguous media names (eg: Utopia - which of the 5 possible series do you mean?)

But these are issues all media libraries face.

Group series episodes in per series (or even per season) folders and include a tvshow.nfo file with any IDs.

eg:

  <episodeguide>{"tmdb":"328","imdb":"tt0983200","tvdb":"82616","tvrage":"7565","wikidata":"Q6805564"}</episodeguide>
  <id>82616</id>
  <imdbid>tt0983200</imdbid>
  <tmdbid>328</tmdbid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="tmdb">328</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="imdb">tt0983200</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="true" type="tvdb">82616</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="tvrage">7565</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="wikidata">Q6805564</uniqueid>
  <premiered>1989-05-08</premiered>

is over kill for Media Watch https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/328-media-watch

which just leaves the issue of TheMovieDB being weak on metadata for that series .. but can be completed from theTVDB https://www.thetvdb.com/series/media-watch

Soemtimes I have needed to rename files, but to me it is both sensible (how else to recognize a show, maybe a metadata file) and totally worth it.

I don't want to need to have a centralized account to access my media library on my device.

I don't want to have to pay monthly to enable hardware transcoding.

I can't because most of my media is in an off-site server and the mount point is readonly

Then rename them at the off-site server?

There are very specific and common standard on renaming video files to contain "metadata" so that every single tool doesn't have to use ffmpeg to investigate and try to guess the exact movie/tv show from the title.

The Plex naming guidelines are pretty good: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...

Some people like to add resolution and audio track information to the file name too.

You need to sometimes suffix the folder/file name with {imdb-tt1234} to make it match the correct movie/show.

This is the same deal with Plex tho, although I found plex internal metadata engine to auto-match better than jellyfin currently does.

You can help here though. Just come to https://www.themoviedb.org/ and help us add metadata.

Changing files isn't really an option for me because my media stays in an off-site server and the mount point is readonly.

I'll setup jellyfin and see which titles I'm unable to add and try to collaborate on metadata. It's always important to favor opensource. I can always have both services running side by side.

You can also manually match each movie from the jellyfin frontend, but the issue with going this path is that if you need to rebuild your jellyfin instance for some reason, you would need to redo all of this manual matching.

So, the recommended path is to clean up the media files:

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/