I think Plex’s organization options for combining related shows and movies and disc releases are limiting, especially for anime.
I made a feature request topic on this in the past, but I’ve figured out exactly what I want now. HamaTV and Absolute Series Scanner don’t have the power to do these things. They need to be native to Plex, and Jellyfin already supports these features.
Things I think Plex needs:
We need a way to name seasons.
The fact that seasons are sequentially numbers means that a movie that comes out between 2 seasons of a show would make “Season 2” be “Season 3” because seasons are numerically ordered.
Many anime series, like Dragon Ball Z, are one single season, but if you could divide those episodes into arcs (named seasons), then you can divide it up in a way where it’s easier to watch.
Seasons aren’t able to be split up. If a movie or anime OVA comes out that’s supposed to be watched between two episodes of a season, you can’t split that season in two to inject that movie between those episodes.
Many of these movies have a greater emotional impact if you could watch them in the correct watch order. I don’t wanna have my phone out while watching just to make sure I stop Plex from playing episode 7 and instead go to watch a movie in between.
TVDB, TMDB, nor IMDB handle watch order correctly, and I think it’s because Plex has no native way to properly configure watch order.
Specials aren’t all documentaries. Many of them are episodes that are only available on disc and are meant to be watched between episodes.
I don’t want to be punished by Plex for purchasing and ripping a Blu-ray disc because it doesn’t support a way for me to take a disc-only episode and insert it between season episodes.
I don’t want to rely on playlists; Plex should natively support disc-only episodes.
If it goes between episodes 6 and 7, I want to visually see it there in my Season view. This is why renaming seasons is so important. If we get away from what we call “Season 1”, then it makes sense that we could insert Special 1 between episodes 6 and 7.
These issues exist because Plex is designed around show and movie separation. Sure, in most cases this can work especially when things are only movies, but not all.
In my experience, 90% of my anime don’t fit in this box and aren’t even ordered properly on disc. It’s the same for something like Tron. Sure, there are 2 movies, but there’s also a TV show. Wouldn’t you want that all together in a single place?
Same with Pocoyo and other kids shows. I have to tell my wife “the movie is actually in a different spot than the TV shows”. She does not care. Why make it so overly complicated in Plex?
You can name seasons and the Plex TV Series agent will automatically pick up season titles for you if enabled.
Seasons as such aren’t meant to be split. There’s already an existing suggestion asking for an option to display specials inline with the season where they might belong.
There’s a somewhat related suggestion for Plex to provide additional means to configure what other content is related / should play before a specific episode)
I suggest you comment/vote in these threads in order to help us avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes.
As a side note… please stick to the rules for the feature suggestion category and go for 1 suggestion per thread. Otherwise other users will only be able to vote for the full package instead of a single feature they might like.
Went ahead and removed my vote. It seems like this will never happen since the existing suggestions are so old.
Is there a way to close feature threads? I have two now that I want to get rid of.
How do you name seasons? Where is that documented? All I saw was naming it with a number. That’s fine, but I want to name seasons with a name and be able to specify in Plex where that season exists in-order.
I’ve read that help article before, but just read it again hoping to find something new.
I’m not seeing anything that lets you name seasons anything other than 1, 2, etc. It only seems to work for numbers, and it needs to be named what TVDB has or else you won’t get metadata. Not seeing any way around that.
You can’t name it “Season Sinners of the System” nor can you assign {tmdb-2342} numbers to specific episodes; only the series itself.
You can easily name seasons. Press the edit button on the season then just update the tile. I did this for doctor who years ago e.g key to time etc.
When it comes to specials the best option I’ve found is to manually add them to the season in question by adding them as extra episodes either at the beginning (episode 0) or at the end.
