Plex and Racing shows

I’m a big fan of the Plex Media system, both the player and the server. We use it as our main source of entertainment. All of our shows and movies are held in the server. We have over 8TB of media indexed by it.

The system works perfectly for any TV show and movie, which captures the majority of usage. However, the title of this post is about how to deal with the edge-case that is racing. Racing is like a TV show, in that it has seasons, but the conflict lies in the expectation from Plex to organize TV shows into episodes. The solution is to use a custom scanner (here) and organize your racing sessions as incremental episodes.

The way I did it was like this:

Season = The year
Episode = This is the tricky part, I chose this pattern:
- e[round][session] – [session name].ext

Let’s use this as an example; 2019 Monaco GP.

Practice 1: e0601 – Monaco GP Practice 1.mp4
- The episode is 601 to note the round and session
Qualifying 3: e0613 – Monaco GP Qualifying 3.mp4
- The episode increments to 10s to separate qualifying from practice. So QP1 would be 11, while QP2 would be 12
Race: e0621 – Monaco GP Race.mp4
- Like practice, just as a way to group sessions, the episode increments to 20s

2019 
  |____ F1
         |_____e0601 - Monaco GP Practice 1.mp4
         |_____e0602 - Monaco GP Practice 2.mp4
         |_____...
         |_____e0621 - Monaco GP Race.mp4

MotoGP is a little trickier because the weekend is made up of multiple classes and sessions. However, depending on what you are capturing, you could implement a similar episode numbering scheme. For example, you could do something like this; 2019 Catalunya GP.