Watch crossover episodes of several series in-order

General Discussions
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Unfortunately Plex doesn’t track your progress through a playlist.
With audio, there is currently no workaround for this.

With TV shows and movies however, you can make it work.
This relies on the watched/unwatched status which Plex stores for every video, and on ‘smart playlists’ and on the ‘Airdate’ which Plex downloads automatically for correctly matched tv show episodes..

Here is an example for the Arrow/Flash/Supergirl/Legends of Tomorrow ‘universe’:

This is a ‘smart’ playlist, which grows and shrinks automatically as new episodes come in and episodes get watched.

the snag:

if you stop in the middle of an episode, the episode may or may not be included in this playlist anymore, depending on how far into the episode you got.
In this case, you must remember to

  1. continue watching the half-watched episode from OnDeck
  2. after this episode is finished, don’t continue watching, but press Stop
  3. then call up your playlist and play this instead

Thankfully the above workaround is no longer needed in some Plex clients (Plex Media Player for instance).

How to build the playlist:

  1. enter your TV Show library in Plex Web
  2. set the library view mode to ‘Episodes’
  3. then activate the ‘Custom Filters’

  1. filter for ‘Show Title’ ‘contains’ ‘Arrow’ or ‘Flash’ (you must press Enter after typing in each show title)
  2. click on the + icon to add a second filter condition ‘Episode plays’ ‘is’ ‘0’ (again, press Enter after typing the 0)
  3. click on ‘Apply’

  1. set the sorting order to ‘By Air Date’
  2. set the sorting order again to ‘By Air Date’ (only this time, it will be ascending - check the little arrow icon) - this is crucial!

  1. finally, click on the ‘Add to Playlist’ icon (circled in the second screenshot above) and give your playlist a name and save it