Comic Strips

Assuming that the leading number and period is part of the filename:

1. If the directory-browsing thing supports natural sorting of numbers, you can use that; this will detect numbers within the filename and sort by them. For example, I use emacs's dired to browse directories and play movies. It can modify the flags passed to ls, and ls supports natural sorting of numbers in filenames with the -v flag. Doing this in dired means C-u s v RET, and the directory will be displayed sorted numerically.

2. If the directory-browsing thing doesn't support that, rename to a "0"-padded format such that a lexicographic order has the same ordering as numeric order:

    $ for f in *; do
        n="$(printf %04d ${f%%.*})"
        mv "$f" "$(echo $f|sed s/^[0-9]*/$n/)"
    done 
   

   That way,

    1. Episode_One.mp4
   

   will become

    0001. Episode_One.mp4
   

   and so forth, and so software that can only do lexicographic orderings is happy.

If the leading number and period isn't part of the filename, then we need to parse human-language strings.

$ npm install words-to-numbers

$ for f in *; do
    w="$(echo $f|sed -r "s/^Episode_([^.]*).mp4/\1/")"
    n=$(echo $w|node -e 'wn=require("words-to-numbers"); const l=require("readline").createInterface({input:process.stdin, output:process.stdout, terminal:false}); rl.on("line", l=> {console.log(wn.wordsToNumbers(l));})')
    nf=$(printf %04d $n)
    mv "$f" "$nf. $f"
done

That'll rename to the format mentioned above in option 2:

Episode_One.mp4

will become

0001. Episode_One.mp4

And lexicographic sorting will work.