Absolute order / hide seasons

Feature Suggestions
1

Hiding the seasons right now serves little to no purpose other than just skipping the season selection. I have a TV show which has some pointless seasons, and to get it to match with TMDB, I have to follow their structure. Which is fine, because that’s the way the show was distributed (on DVD). But on my Plex Player, I’d like to view them in absolute order, but you can’t really do that right now.
What I want is the ability to sort episodes by air date/title (you can kinda emulate that with Smart Collections), and either renumber them based on that selection (without including the specials) or keep the original position but make the counting continuous (S1E1 → 1, S1E2 → 2, S2E1 → 3, …).

2

You actually can use TVDb’s absolute order.

  1. Edit the show (:pencil2:)
  2. Open the Advanced tab
  3. Set Episode ordering to TheTVDB (Absolute)
  4. You might need to refresh the show’s metadata – I believe Plex has started to do that on its own recently… just in case

Make sure to setup your files accordingly.
Result: one flat list of episodes, no seasons.

2 Likes
3

No, I cannot, because there are no episodes in TVDB’s Absolute Order (all unassigned). Also, I do want to use the season/DVD order for file organisation, because that’s how I’ve ripped them from the DVD collection, but still display them in a unified list. Just working around this issue will also not allow one to sort by name, which makes the episode’s sorttitle pointless.

4

Well… if you want to mix both worlds – how about adding those episodes to a smart collection? You can filter by show name and sort by air date, no season organization getting in the way.

5

Yeah, I’ve mentioned in my OP that you could emulate this with collections (they don’t need to be smart collections), but besides (TV show) collections not even being supported on my 2014 Samsung (not a big deal because I got a FireTV in my living room), collections seem to be permanently stuck in poster view and there’s not even a way to hide the show afterwards.
If those two (technically three but the Samsung client is EOL) issues were to be fixed, I could look over the fact that collections are not really meant to be used that way (e.g. they highlight the show title rather than the episode title) and close this. But really, there should be a stricter separation between backend (matching format) and frontend (presentation).