The problem with media organizers like Kodi — they need clean input (like the naming scheme I mentioned above), that’s why I needed other tools. My first requirement was to put each movie file(s) among the mess into their individual folders with the correct year. Read on…

I stumbled upon this tool through some online forum which also (thankfully) had a link to a guide on how to rename movies. Otherwise, it could have been pretty difficult to make this Windows-only tool work for my use case owing to its funky, non-intuitive interface. Good part about this tool is that it could guess the titles of movies from a long list of movie files with messy filenames and present the results together for you to verify and rename. The end result after the rename was a movie file correctly renamed and put into its individual directory. I was able to use this tool as a filter before passing the movies to Kodi for 70% of the collection. It obviously uses network for the guesswork and for some odd reason a lot of files ended up with a !!!NETWORK ERROR!!! I had to hunt for other options.

This tool turned out to be a lot nicely designed than the previous, was cross-platform and worked well without surprises. It ran this only on the movie files which ended up with network error with TheRenamer and was happy to see that it worked interactively in that it presents its guesses to the user for each file it processes, so that one can choose the right movie title. End result was each file was renamed to my desired naming scheme. I ended up wondering why I did not try this tool earlier? The answer was that it lacks the ability to create individual folders, hence, another tool/script was needed.

This was a no-brainer. You supply it a list of files, hit Move! and it creates individual folder for each file with the same name as the filename. I passed it the files obtained from FileBot and voilà, my clean input to Kodi was ready!

I could have avoided using this last tool by writing some bash script on my own, but I was using my brother’s machine which had just Windows installed and I was almost there.