How is the best way to do this? There is a TV series that is called Chibi Maruko Chan. When it was transmitted on the air, the episodes were two short 11-12 minute episodes, shown on the same date. All of the online databases (TVDB, TMDB, etc) show each episode as separate.
For example, S1E1 contains two stories, Maru-chan’s Sibling Rivalry followed by Here Comes the Tutor. However, all the databases scrubbed by the agents show S1E1 Maru-chan’s Sibling Rivalry and then S1E2 Here Comes the Tutor.
The video for the series is like how it was transmitted, two stories in one episode. Splitting up the stories and renumbering is not desired. But what I would like is for the files, stories, and descriptions to match. Even if I have to do it all locally.
Any suggestions? I’d really like to fix it so the online agents have the right data, but it is really confusing to me how to do that. It’s a lot of work.
The further you get in the series, obviously the descriptions and titles shift even more (E3 is really the first story in as-transmitted E2, E4 is second story in E2… E5 is first story in as-transmitted E3, E6 the second…etc…)
Just to clarify… you have files that contain multiple episodes, e.g. file 1 contains episodes 1-2, file 2 contains episodes 3-4 etc?
You can name the files to reflect that, e.g.
Show Name - s01e01-e02
Show Name - s02e03-e04
…
This will create two items per file in your library, each with the metadata of the designated episode. If you’ve watch episode 1, the full file will play (episodes 1+2), progressing straight to episode 3
Still… it appears some users have trouble with this approach. If you click on episode 2, Plex will play the linked file, obviously starting with the content of episode 1.
There’s a number of related feature suggestions to improve this (ranging from defining the episode timecodes to merging the episodes into a single item per file).
If the files have an easily recognizable cut (e.g. if there’s chapters per episode), I personally prefer to actually split the files (this can be done quite easily with MKVToolNix).
thank you for that suggestion. The challenge is that the episodes are just that episodes. The episode had two stories, sometimes which were part 1 and 2 of the same storyline. So where your suggested approach fails is that the online databases imply that there were two separate air dates for the stories in each episode. For example Episode 1 aired on a date, let’s pretend Jan 1. On that date, both story 1 and story 2 aired. But the online databases say that story 1 is Episode 1, and it aired Jan 1. Story 2 is Episode 2 that aired a week later. This is confusing and also wrong.
in the meantime, I will try my best to see if renaming the episode in a way that incorrectly calls the stories episodes, fixes the matching on my local plex.
just wish there was a way to easily fix this.
Just curious, and I may have to look now, Beavis and Butthead does a similar thing where the new series has episodes with two or more stories. I’m gonna have to look on how the TVDB and TMDB treat them
