Table of Contents
Filenames
[Documents, pandora*, 0xdb2*)]TOC(heading=Design
This document describes a naming convention for archived movie files.
Format
character/director/title[/Extras|/Versions]/file
character: first character of director
director: "; ".join(sort_names) | "Unknown"
title: sort_title[ (YYYY)]
file: title[.SXXEYY][.episode_title][.version_name][.Part X[.part_title]][.track_name][.language].extension
Examples
"L/Last Names, First Names/film, Le (1999)/Le film.Part 1.Le debut.avi"
"B/Bar, Foo X.; Bar Jr., Foo X_/Film, A (2001)/A Film.Director's Cut.en.mkv"
"G/Group Name, The/Film, The (1970)/Extras/The Film.Restored Version.Part 1.Beginnings.Director's Commentary (French).mp3"
"C/Creator Last Name, Creator First Name/serie, La (2000)/La serie.S01E01.La première.European Version.Part 1.fr.srt"
Character
The aim is to have less than 1.000 entries per directory, so that file managers still perform. So we need a sub-directory, for which the upper case latinized (i.e. accent-less) first character of the director directory is used. We assume that only A-Z and 0-9 will occur.
If there were more than 1.000 directors with the same first letter, a two-character sub-directory could be better. Still, it's unlikely that this point will be reached. Some numbers from 0xdb, as of December 2009: ca. 8.000 Movies, 2.541 directors, 26 sub-directories (A-Z), most items in S (243), B (226) and M (205), there would be 238 two-letter sub-directories, most items in Ma (77), De (57) and Ca (56). If the apostrophe in L'... and O'... was removed, there would still be B_ (B., Beth) and O_ (O., Dore) as special cases.
Director
This is the sort name of the director (or, for series, the creator), which is usually "Last Names, First Names", but "Last Names First Names" (without the comma) for some asian names. "Le", "de", "von", "van der" etc. are considered to be part of the last name. For groups, their sort name is used as well, which is "Group Name", or "Group Name, The". If the last letter of the director string is a dot, it is replaced by an underscore, since some file systems may not like trailing dots.
Multiple directors are separated with a semicolon and a space, their names appear in the order they are credited on IMDb, which is not necessarily the alphabetical order. There may be films with a large number of directors, but this seems to be so rare that it doesn't justify a special case, like "V/Various Directors". [if we have a 255 char limit]check In case there is more than one director with the same name, the director name should be post-fixed with "(Year of Birth)" or ("Year of Birth-Year of Death"). Finally, movies without known director, or series without known creator, go into "U/Unknown".
Examples: "Godard, Jean-Luc", "Fassbinder, Rainer Werner", "van Gogh, Theo", "De Palma, Brian", "Suzuki, Norifumi", "Wong Kar Wai", "Bernadette Corporation", "KLF, The", "Smith, Jack (1932-1989)"
Title
The title sub-directory makes it easier to share single movies as a single torrent, and helps to avoid clutter for directors with a large number of movies, or movies with a large number of files. The sort title is used, which is "Title, The", or "film, Le" (the first letter is not changed to upper case). Additionally, if the year is known, it is appended in brackets, to avoid ambiguities (see examples). In the rare case that this is still ambiguous, a roman numeral is appended, as on IMDb.
NOTE: In practice, this turns out to look stupid, especially non-capitalized titles like "enface, L' (1993)". While for directors, "Lastname, Firstname" makes sense, there is not much value in sorting movies by title. It would be much more meaningful to sort them by year (to be able to see early/late films, or select the previous/next film). So format should rather be "(YYYY) Le film".
NOTE: settling for "Le film (YYYY)"...
The title should be the original language title if it is English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (or any other language the archivists are able to read and verify), otherwise, the international U.S. or English title, if any, should be used. While special characters and punctuation should be preserved, colons, slashes, asterisks and leading or (for movies without year) trailing dots need to be replaced by underscores. A parser should (at least) assume that "x_ " is "x: ", "x_x" is "x/x", "x _ x" is "x / x", a single underscore at the beginning or end of the string is a dot, and multiple consecutive underscores are consecutive asterisks.
Examples: "Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1934)", "Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1956)", "Film with Unknown Year", "Film with Unknown Year and Trailing Dots..", "The Simpsons The Movie", "Untitled (2000 I)", "Untitled (I)", "Film We Didn't Manage to Split, A (1999) + From Another Film, Even Though We Tried Hard (2001)", "(A Film with a Title That Begins with) A Bracket"*
- this may not preserve the sort order, but "Film with a Title That Begins with) Bracket, (" (or 'Foo" Bar, "') looks wrong
File
Director and year are not repeated in the file name, so that it doesn't grow too long. The parts of the file name are separated by dots, since this is already the convention for language and extension, and in order to avoid consecutive hyphens or brackets ("Title - With a Hyphen - Part 1.avi", "Title (With Brackets) (Part 1).avi"), or nested brackets ("Title (Part 1 Part Title (With Brackets)).avi"). With dots, there are fewer ambiguous cases ("Web 2.0.avi", "Dot.com.avi", "If....avi").
The file name begins with the title (not sort title), and is followed by: episode ("SxxEyy", for series that have multiple numbered seasons and episodes ... note that yy can be 00), episode title (for episodes that have a title), version name ("Director's Cut", "Long Version", "Excerpt", etc.), part ("Part x", for movies split into multiple files), part title (for movies with parts that have titles), track name (mandatory for audio or subtitle commentary files), language (for hard-coded subs and srt files, can be omitted if there is only one English srt file) and extension ("avi", "mpg" etc. for movie files, "srt", "sub", "idx" for subtitle files - "rar" should be unpacked - and "mp3", "aac" etc for audio commentary files).
A parser should not assume that, in "Part x", x is a number (special part strings: "Six fois deux.Part 4B.Nanas.avi"), or that for one movie, x begins at 0 or is consecutive (segment films: "Paris vu par....Part 3.Montparnasse-Levallois.avi"), but only concatenate parts in sort order. Further, it should be ok, for the sake of simplicity, to denote languages using ISO 3166 for countries, instead of the correct ISO 639 for languages, and to use "cc" and "en" to distinguish English closed captioning subtitles from normal English subtitles, in case both are present.
Examples: "Apocalypse Now.Director's Cut.Part 1.avi", "Apocalypse Now.Director's Cut.Part 1.fr.srt", "Ché Part 1.Part 1.avi", "Der Himmel über Berlin.Part 1.en.avi", "Inland Empire.Director's Commentary.srt", "The Wire.S01E01.The Target.avi", "Generation Kill.E01.Get Some.avi", "Cinema, de notre temps.David Lynch_ Don't Look at Me.avi", "Historie(s) de cinéma.Part 1a.Toutes les histories.avi"*
- in this case, a parser follwing IMDb would move "Historie(s) de cinéma/Historie(s) de cinéma.Part 1a.Toutes les histories.avi" to "Histoire(s) du cinéma_ Toutes les histoires (1988)/Histoire(s) du cinéma_ Toutes les histoires.avi", which is unfortunate ... but, in order to preserve the part information, a workaround could be to name the file "Histoire(s) du cinéma_ Toutes les histoires (1988)/Histoire(s) du cinéma_ Toutes les histoires.Part 1a.avi"
Extras and Versions
Extras go into an "Extras" sub-directory within the movie directory. The file names begin with the movie title, followed by the title of the extra, or "Extras" if none, plus eventual additional parts.
Examples: "Extras/The Film.Extras.avi", "Extras/The Film.Interview.avi", "Extras/The Film.Behind the Scenes.Part 1.Getting Behind the Scenes.de.srt"
Additional versions go into a "Versions" sub-directory within the movie directory. They may be ignored (as extras are), or parsed (in a system that needs multi-version views). The version in the movie directory is considered to be the main version. Versions do not have additional "Extras" sub-directories.
Examples: "Versions/The Film.Short Version.avi", "Versions/The Film.Original Version.Part 1.es.srt"