Batch-Renaming Movies using Regex

I've been trying to rename some movie files using regular expressions, but so far I have been only marginally successful. The goal is to parse files like this:

2001.A.Space.Odyssey.1968.720p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-LiNG.mkv

And rename them Like this:

2001 A Space Odyssey (1968).mkv

I created the pattern: ^(.+)\.(\d{4}).+\.(mp4|avi|mkv)$

With the output: \1 (\2).\3

Now, this works perfectly fine when I have movies with one-word titles, but when there is more than one word separated by a period, the regex fails to grab anything.

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer

Your pattern seems to work fine for me with that example filename and Perl as the regex engine:

$ echo '2001.A.Space.Odyssey.1968.720p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-LiNG.mkv' | 
    perl -npe 's/^(.+).(\d{4}).+.(mp4|avi|mkv)$/\1 (\2).\3/'

2001.A.Space.Odyssey (1968).mkv

The only thing I would change is to escape the .'s where you actually do want them to refer to a period and not a wildcard. In particular it's probably safe to assume the final period before the file extension is actually a period - I'm not sure about the one between the title and the year.