I have some files with two episodes in a single file. This happens quite often with cartoon series that broadcast two episodes at once, or with special episodes of normal TV series. When named correctly (e.g. “Series name - S01E01-E02 - Episode titles”), Plex spots them as two episodes and has two entries in the library pointing at the same file. Playing either episode will play both episodes, but only mark one of them as watched. This is messy and confusing.
My suggestion is to only show one entry for the combined episodes. In the background, that would mean that each episode media item would have an episode range (which for most would only be 1 episode), but for these combined files would cover two (or more) episodes. Watching this single media item would then mean both episodes would be marked as watched.
In display terms, at the moment you show (in a season) the thumbnail, episode title and “Episode #”. I would change that for multi-episode items to show thumbnail, single-line bulleted list of episode titles, and “Episodes # to #”.
While there is some advantage to having two or more entries for one file when that file contains multiple episodes I find it to be MUCH less than ideal to the point where I don’t use the multiple episode format. That is I no longer use the format like s01e01-e02 but rather I just use s01e01 and then change the episode title to include the second episode.
That is also less than ideal but it has the advantage of only playing the episodes once when playing the series.
The ideal would be something like suggested where both episodes get flagged as played when either is played through.
This is a mild annoyance of mine whenever I have an applicable episode. I don’t even let plex do the sorting automatically, I just manually change the title to include both titles, or something like (Parts 1 & 2), etc.
All I want is a single thumbnail which shows (which I think agrees with you?):
Episode 12
Title
Episode 13
Title
(Or any number of combinations that would convey the same info). Hopefully in a way that would not disrupt the spacing in the UI too much.
I certainly don’t need anything robust that tries and figures out where to split the episode to make two thumbnails, or basically anything that creates two separate thumbnails.
I cut the two episodes with mkvtoolnix at the right point!
Afterwards I didn’t have this problem! I guess my solution is a possible way, too. The problem with two episodes in one file is quite big. You don’t have any information about the length of every episode. The Seconde problem ist, that information like description, rating, release writers, directors can be different. I take care of all information of my tv series, so I guess the best way to solve this problem is to split the file. You need a little bit of video magic to get the intro on the second file, but it is worth it.
Whilst having two files is clearly best, the idea is for Plex to support what exists not what is ideal.
For run-time, just list the runtime of the combined file. Plex doesn’t have to say “episode X is NN mins” and “episode Y is MM mins”. Runtimes are taken from the media, not as downloaded metadata.
The issue of multiple directors, etc… is one I had not considered. I would still prefer a single media item. How about this:
Description: concatenate the text with an inline text header for each episode.
Rating: whatever is the highest
Release date: whatever is the latest
People: if the same, show the person; if different, concatenate (“Alpha Beta & Charlie Delta”) or say “Multiple”
This way, if you want to change your media to show the right data you can manually split the files. If you just want to watch your media as is, then Plex can track it correctly.
I find this to be a big problem with kids tv shows as they will often times have 2 10 min episodes stuck together so they’ll better fit in a tv schedule, I know cutting the files doesn’t seem like a big deal when you have maybe 1 or 2 a season, but when you have 28 in a season that are all glued together this gets to be a little cumbersome. But at least having Plex be a little smarter about them would be handy, even if all it did was make the two entries as played and to not play the episode twice when you do a play on the season. I am actually fine with the video starting from the start of the previous episode if they are in the same file. This may also make it easier to implement if they don’t have to worry about making the video start part way through.
Yes, i have a problem with Paw Patrol, because the files have two episodes, so the file s01e02, actually contains the 3rd and 4th episodes. The matching is wrong because of that. It is unfortunate because that’s how the files are arranged on the original DVD as well.
While tearing video files apart to fix this problem works for some, it is not a solution for all. Season 1 of RWBY has a number of episodes that are 2 part episodes yet have no discernible separate episode. While I could rename them to avoid this problem, it would only be a patch and not a solution. Marking both as watched is the ideal solution as it utilizes the naming strategy prescribed for media preparation and allows a person to play the entire season without watching the same episode multiple times.
I think that the “resume playback from hh:mm:ss” internal functionality could (and should) be extended to start such multi-episode files at their specified places, with the start time able to be specified in the episode’s Edit data. It wouldn’t take a huge amount of extra coding, and I think it would be cool. It would also allow server owners to set the start time of any given media file(s) to skip the silly intros at the beginning and start where the feature actually begins.
I would post this as a feature request, but I think it would end up closed, as a duplicate of this thread.
A request for the same feature exists already, and it has more votes.
Therefore this one is closed.
Votes are given back to the users who voted on this request. Please think of re-voting in the other thread if you still want it.
Please search before creating a new suggestion thread.
Only one feature per thread.
