Getting Your Stargate SG-1 Collection in Order
I spent about three weekends sorting through my Stargate SG-1 files. Ten seasons, 214 episodes, multiple video formats, and enough subtitle files to make your head spin. If you are trying to do the same thing, here is what actually works. The first problem nobody talks about is that the episode numbering is not straightforward. There is the original production order, the syndication order, the DVD order, and then various streaming platforms decided to shuffle things too. I hit this when trying to match my downloaded files to a metadata service. IMDb listed episode numbers one way, TVmaze listed them differently, and the actual DVD box sets had yet another system. I stopped fighting it and just used the production code numbers. Those never change. Season 1 episode 1 is "Children of the Gods" regardless of which ordering system you use, and the production code "SG1-101" stays consistent everywhere. Here is what I ended up doing. I wrote a simple Python script that renames all the video files using the format SG1-S{episode:02d}-E{episode:02d}.{ext}. It pulls the episode number from the existing filename, normalizes it, and rebuilds the name. For the first few seasons where files were scattered across folders, I manually checked against the official production codes. Season 1 through 3 had some episodes that were split differently in various regions, so those needed a double check. After that, the script handled everything else in about twenty minutes.
I also grabbed subtitle files in bulk using a tool called Subs2SRS or just matched them manually for the ones that were missing. Most of the time you can find them on OpenSubtitles, but you have to be careful about the language encoding. Some of the .srt files from that era have encoding issues that make them useless in modern players. I learned that the hard way with about a dozen episodes in season 4. The workaround was converting them with iconv to UTF-8 before loading them into VLC. For organizing the folder structure, I went with a flat directory at first. Just all 214 episodes in one folder. Then I switched to season subfolders because searching through two hundred plus files in a single directory became annoying pretty quickly. The structure I settled on is: Stargate SG-1/
S01/SG1-S01E01-Chidren of the Gods.mkv S01/SG1-S01E02-The Eye Begins.mkv and so on.
Get the Full Details
Metadata is where people usually waste the most time. Scrapers like Kodi or Plex can pull information automatically, but they are inconsistent with Stargate. The show has a lot of guest characters, two different spinoffs to account for, and the movies that bridge seasons. I found that manually writing a NFO file for each episode with the correct details was faster than fighting the auto-scraper. It took about an hour total, and then it was done permanently. One thing to watch out for: the stargate SG-1 episode list A journey through 10 seasons of adventure includes the TV movies like "Infinite Reality" and "Unending." Some scraping services treat these as regular episodes and put them in the wrong season. You have to manually move those to their proper place or tag them separately if your media server supports movies vs episodes. There is no perfect automated solution for this. Even the well-regarded Tachiyomi and similar tools miss details on older shows with messy release histories. The manual approach is slower upfront but it saves you from spending hours fixing incorrect metadata later. I would recommend spending the first evening doing it properly rather than chasing corrections forever.
