I have been collecting Christmas-related material (variety specials, sitcom episodes, cartoons, etc), and Im having trouble organizing them in Plex–or to have Plex recognize them all.
I created a TV Show called “Christmas Specials”, then separated the categories above into “Seasons” (e.g, Season 1 is all the variety specials). I’ve added all the metadata that should be needed, and run the files through Subler to make them streaming-friendly.
Some of the files will not display (meaning they aren’t in the Season menu) in Plex, and when I try to fix an entry by playing around with the metadata, more of them disappear. I also see items listed that say they are show XYZ, but when you play them, there are something else entirely.
I really don’t want to have these programs strewn across my library in separate entries. Any ideas or suggestions?
(I know I’m on a slightly older server version–when the last update happened, Plex completely broke, forcing me to downgrade. I’ll do an upgrade if and when they put out a stable version).
Have you considered organizing/naming/matching them based on their actual names/association and add them to a collection (or in your case maybe different collections for the different types of specials)?
See below an example of a classic episode collection… I used to play around with a smart collection but the episode titles / descriptions don’t consistently mention “X-Mas”, so I stayed with the manual version.
If I were to go down that route, is there any way to “hide” the entries in the main TV Show library, and just show them in a Collection? I still would rather avoid a large set of single episodes entries to bloat the library listing.
Hiding the content is absolutely possible with collections. All the movies in my collections are hidden so the only thing that shows in the main library is the collection. You have to enter the collection to see any of what is contained in it. In the collections advanced settings change the visibility option to Hide items in this collection. This can also be accomplished at the library level in its advanced options.
Well… kind of – it’s correct this is a collection display option for movies (both on a per-collection or library level). An episode-level collection will also hide its content when you’re displaying it in episode-mode. When you access the library in tv-show mode, the episodes will show regularly in their seasons.
I have yet to test if Plex will “collapse” shows that consist entirely of hidden episodes. Edit: tested; shows w/ only episodes from collections configured to hide their episodes will still show in the “TV Show” view.
Oh, I missed that they were episodes. Thank you for pointing that out @tom80H. I agree with your second suggestion to make a seperate library with all of them in there, and expanding on that, what I would do is, do them as movies with custom metadata and build collection for each type. This would allow you to have a clean library dedicated to Christmas films and shows that doesn’t interfere with your other libraries. If that is possible, I think @tom80H can elaborate on if that is even an option.
From what I understood we were talking about x-mas episodes / specials… so going with a regular tv-show type library should be ok in that case. Personally I wouldn’t even bother with custom metadata… just add them as what they are.
Inside that x-mas library, episodes could then be organized by their different flavors (in case those are not reflected by regular metadata/filters.
This might be one of the rare cases where you’ll display the library by episodes on a regular basis (instead of grouping them by seasons or shows.
Thanks everyone–I’ve decided to go the separate library route. Created “Christmas Movies & Specials” (most TV specials seem to be tagged as movies) and “Christmas TV” libraries, which I can pin and unpin based on the calendar. It’s going to take a while to get all the metadata reset and collected–will hopefully be done before the holiday
Happy to hear that! Hopefully it isn’t too much work to get it the way you like it. Doesn’t hesitate to ask if you have anymore issues, and have a Merry Christmas!
