I had originally thought that absolute ordering would be really tricky and involve a new scanner as well as an agent, but since Jam said that it was already supposed to work, and it does work with the scanner, all I did was make a version of the regular agent that forces it to look at the right data.
AbsoluteOrderingAgent.plexapp (9.52 KB)
Since the devs intended for the default one to work with abs ordering, this should be considered a workaround until they fix their more elegant solution, but I like to think I’m freeing up their time to work on more critical bugs and add more awesome features.
It seems to work with some fake Naruto files I have set up (I don’t actually have any abs ordered stuff). If you use it, report back and let me know how it works for real people’s files.
Thank you very much for working on this Rain. Unfortunately my MacMini is currently with Apple as it was overheating, otherwise I'd test it straight away and let you know. I will post back here though when I get it back :)
I did a couple tries with my Bleach folder this morning, it seemed to work in part when all files are in the same folder. In part, because Plex only picked up episodes 1 to 100 and 201 to 300 (300 being the last I got so far), but I'm pretty sure that's a Plex scanning problem, since the files don't show at all, either in the media manager or in the Plex GUI.
When I split the files evenly in three folders named Season 1, 2 and 3, all files are found, but the episodes in the Season 2 folder are recognized as episodes 1 to XXX instead of 101 to XXX. I'd assume this is just a side-effect of the agent's design, since it isn't supposed to take season numbers into account.
Would it work if I split my files in several folders without naming them "season XX"?
Nope, doesn't work. Should I prepend the episode number with something in particular, as in 1x001, 1x002, ... ? Apparently, the agent uses the first digit as the season number, so "Bleach - 013" is recognized as season 0, episode 13, and "Bleach - 202" is recognized as season 2, episode 2. Needless to say, that doesn't work very well :)
Hold on, I’m playing with tweaking the scanner.
Okay, this seems to work:
Tweaked Series Scanner.py.zip (3.3 KB)
All I did was remove the parts in the scanner that allowed it to recognize “ShowName.101” as season 1, episode 1. So if you use this tweak, you can’t use that naming scheme for any of your files in the section (you can’t have a per-series scanner). Put this file in ~/L/AS/PMS/Scanners/Series (you’ll need to create the folder “Series”, and then edit the section to use this scanner.
I don’t think it should break anything else, but no promises, so you may want to do some backing up first. 
Let me know if it works.
Trying it atm. Looks like it's working fine for Bleach, at the very least, though it hasn't finished re-scanning yet. I've fed my entire anime section to the tweaked scanner, and I haven't seen any weird stuff so far. I'll post an update once it's finished, but it looks very promising :)
Thanks a lot for your efforts.
I got my MacMini back but I still seem to have the same problem I was having before. It will only scan up to when the first season ends. For example, I’m using The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya which has 28 episodes, 14 per season. Naming structure is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - 001 etc, following the absolute numbering listed on http://www.thetvdb.com/index.php?tab=seasonall&id=79414&lid=7&order=dvd&order=absolute&order=aired. All is good in that the first 14 episodes are in the correct order, but the last 14 do no get any sort of metadata added to them.
EDIT: Ignore that, everything is working beautifully, thank you.
Yep, it definitely works. It stopped at some point on a large folder yesterday (like 220/300), but forcing it to match using the Absolute Order agent again solved the problem.
Great job! :D
Thanks for this great scanner
It works great for about 95% of the files I have. Very few weird results where episode 2 would show up as episode 643 for example when all other episodes of the same show scan fine. Might be related to naming, but I’ll have to look through it again.
I would like to make 1 request with regards to this scanner if possible. Is it possible to keep the season separation functionality from the original tv show scanner and still keep absolute ordering? Assume for example that I have a folder for a show separated into 2 seasons (1 and 2). If I were to use this scanner to load them into plex, it would load both but under a single header (season 1). So plex would load the show, but you would only see 1 season and ‘x’ episodes (where x represents the maximum of the number of episodes from seasons 1 and 2). If you wanted to play episode 2 of the first season for example, you would navigate to the show in plex, select season 1 (the only choice available), and choose episode 2. Upon doing this, plex will give you a choice of 2 episodes to play (corresponding to the episodes from both seasons), but only the meta data for season 1 will be loaded. Is there any way to have this scanner separate shows into multiple seasons and yet keep absolute ordering?
If it is not possible, would you suggest any workarounds that might rectify this situation?
Thanks
I don’t think that it’s the scanner that’s causing that-- I think that’s the agent.
You should be able to use the scanner as long as you’re not using the naming convention “Showname - 101” to mean season 1 episode 1. That is the only difference between this scanner and the default one (or at least, the difference at the time I made it).
The agent, though, forces Plex to see everything as Season 1. If you use the regular agent as the default one for your section, and then match your abs ordered stuff on a per-series basis (there are some screenshots in the first post of the DVD Order thread showing this) you should be okay.
Thanks for the prompt reply
I tried various combinations of agents and scanners (default agent/scanner vs. agent/scanner in this thread) with series (100+ episodes of bleach as a single season, and 2 seasons of sengoku basara each with 12 episodes placed in the same root file, with each season having its own separate file).
First I’d like to point out the earlier weird results of having ep 1 being scanned as ep 634 was due to the hash number at the end of the file and (i.e. [gg]Sengoku_Basara-1[a3b634].mkv for example). Using the default scanner would not have resulted in this episode being seen as ep 634.
Anyways, back to the combination results:
default scanner/default agent: 3 digit episodes were separated into seasons automatically, but the 2 12 episode seasons were correctly placed in their respective files with no hash error from above (as expected).
default scanner/absolute order agent (directly, not through ‘match using’): Same as above
tweaked Scanner/default agent: 3 digit episodes were seen as a single season, but 2 12 episode shows were overlapped over each other (i.e. 2 seasons represented as 1 season in plex, with hash error discussed above).
tweaked Scanner/absolute order agent (direclty, again): same as above, but with meta-data for bleach.
Trying tweaked Scanner/default agent, and then “match using” absolute order agent doesn’t fix the issue of overlapping seasons. I can only guess that the tweaked scanner is forcing multiple seasons of the same show to overlap.
Is there a way, other than creating different sections, to have certain shows be scanned with the tweaked scanner, whilst others scanned with the default one?
I can’t reproduce the season overlap. Maybe if you told me exactly how your files were named?
As I said before, you cannot select a per-series scanner.
I’ll include some screenshots to let you see what’s going on.
The naming scheme used by most anime tend to look as follows:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/Naming_Example.png
The folders I am adding to the media manager have the following hierarchy (each season has 12 episodes):
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/Picture3.png
If I add the parent file of the show to the media manager with the default scanner, I get this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/Default_Scanner.png
(which is typical of any series).
If I add the parent file of the show using the Tweaked scanner, on the other hand, I get this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/Tweaked_Scanner.png
Both seasons are included in plex, but overlap (where you are given a choice of which episode 1 to play when you navigate to this section in the actual media player)
This occurs irrespective of which agent used (including no agent/personal).
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As far as the weird hex issue is concerned, consider the highlighted file in the following link:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/Naming_Example.png
Under the default scanner, this file would show up as episode 11. But under the tweaked scanner, this file would show up as episode 63. The only way I can see this episode being represented as 63 is because the last 2 values in the hex number in between brackets at the end are 63. The same holds true for the 12th episode, which comes up as 634 under the tweaked scanner (comes out properly as 12 in the default scanner), where 634 is found in the bracketed hex number as well (though in the middle). Oddly enough, none of the other files are influenced by their own respective hex numbers(they show up as their proper episode number). Why these 2 episodes in particular are thrown off, I don’t know 
Note that the reason why you are seeing 12 episodes in the tweaked_scanner screenshot above, and not 14 (due to episodes 11 and 12 being seen as 2 extra episodes 63 and 634) is because I renamed all the files so that they don’t have any hex numbers for testing purposes (not having a hex number would result in the 2 aforementioned episodes being seen as they were intended to in the series chronology). I can’t quite get why this happens for certain hex numbers and not for others (the majority), and why it doesn’t happen at all with the default scanner.
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Sorry for the long post, but I hope it had all the details you needed
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Edit: Will add some extra screenies to show the hex number issue:
I took the last 3 episodes from season 2 (10-12) and placed them in a new folder to show the effect.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/NewFolder.png
When I load them with the default scanner, they load up perfectly as season 2 with proper episode numbers(meta-data does load, but not fully since tvdb does not have episode synopsis for this season - episode titles are correct however).
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/3Files_DefaultScanner.png
When I load them with the tweaked scanner, I get this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/Rayes85/3Files_TweakedScanner.png
Notice episode 10 remains the same, but 11 and 12 are changed to 63 and 634 respectively. Why episode 10 is spared from being changed to episode 901 for instance (901 is in the bracketed hex number), I don’t know. Also notice that the season is loaded as season 1 (I’d assume by design of the scanner), and the meta-data for season 1’s episode 10 is loaded (as opposed to the proper data from the default scanner trial).
So I finally got some time to sit down and look at this. It seems I had commented out the line
(file, year) = VideoFiles.CleanName(file)
which I’m hoping will clear up the hash getting interpreted as an episode number. (Otherwise, I honestly have no clue how the default scanner is doing it.)
I also made a tiny change to the regex for getting the season number from a folder, which seems to fix your problem with non-absolute-ordered stuff that doesn’t have the season number in the filename.
It works for the fake files I set up in the form “Sengoku Basara/Season 2/Sengoku Basara - 05 - Gibberish Gibberish.avi” Let me know how it works with your actual files.
Tweaked Series Scanner - Version 2.py.zip (2.83 KB)
Works perfectly now Both issues fixed
Much :wub:
The Devs should include this with the release as the official anime scanner
Thanks a lot
My apologies for a newbie question. In order to use the Tweaked Scanner version 2 python script, am I to replace the init.py file inside the already installed agent bundle?
Thanks for making this available.
No, agents and scanners are totally different animals. You need them both to make this work.
Put the scanner file in the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Scanners/Series/, where the ~ represents your user home folder. You'll probably need to create the Series folder. Then edit the section in the Plex Media Manager to use this new scanner.
Is there a trick to getting this to work with the new Windows Media Server or is something else needed for that?
This is a question that I originally posted here.
Here is the summary of a few posts from the other thread. Hopefully I have grabbed all of the useful bits.
Chris C suggested that I look for help in this thread and attach the following files.
~/Library/Logs/Plex Media Scanner.log
~/Library/Logs/PMS Plugin Logs/com.plexapp.agents.absorder.log
Anybody seen this problem before?
