Better organization options for Anime (it's more complex than you think)

[sawtaytoes]

After finding Plex an amazing experience to host my rips of movies and TV shows. I bought a bunch of anime discs thinking it’d be the same experience. Well…

After spending the better half of this week with sleepless nights looking into how I can organize my anime (that come straight off the disc), I came to the conclusion that neither Plex nor 3rd party options solve this issue (including HamaTV and Absolute Scanner).

The issues I’m going to list aren’t specific to Anime, but I first noticed them because of anime. I’m not even asking for an “Anime” library type.

Issues

Anime OVAs are not extras, they are separate, usually canonical, episodes and should be treated either as a separate or as part of an existing season.

There are numerous issues with anime that American shows and movies don’t have:

1. When watching anime, I like the language in Japanese and the subtitles in English by default. I don’t want to configure these for every series because it doesn’t scale. I’d rather have a library-level configuration for audio and subtitle language.
2. Anime discs come with OVAs. If you dump these in a “Specials” folder, you lose which season they go with. That means you could be watching specials that reveal spoilers in other seasons without knowing. And many times, these OVAs should be watched during or after a season. TVdb doesn’t always set this correctly.
3. When setting “Seasons: Hide” and setting “Episode sorting: Oldest first”, all Specials are shown first, not aired episodes. These specials (OVAs) will 100% contain spoilers. Even if I didn’t have any OVAs, it doesn’t make sense that specials should appear before episodes. I don’t click a movie and see Extras first, I see the movie, then I can choose to watch Extras.
4. Many TV show discs come with featurettes and other extras for the season. These shouldn’t be part of the show itself; they’re designed to be watched after the season is complete (much like OVAs). While Plex handles this use case, it doesn’t handle it in the browser. I do all my editing in the browser because the mobile experience for doing so is sub-par in the Plex Dash app.
5. Anime shows often mix in full-length movies as part of the show. Sometimes they even replace separate episodes with a movie (this happens a lot with Gintama). As a watcher, I would never know to go to my Movies library to watch the “next season movie”. These movies should appear in the season view as first-class citizens: “Season 4 is a movie”.
6. I shouldn’t have to rely on Collections. Collections work amazingly well for movies, but I don’t use them for any of my American shows. On the other hand, the 3rd party HamaTV plugin sets up shows as collections and seasons as shows with optional specials to mitigate this issue. It even adds movies as shows with a single episode. This means each Season of an anime is “Season 01”. This is a hacky, brittle solution. It’s unreasonable to make users trek through nights and nights of research just to land on a sub-par solution that “kind of does the job”. Plex should have this as part of its offerings considering the popularity of anime and the number of customers (like me) who’ll run into this with no obvious solution.
7. AniDB and MyAnimeList have great anime support. TVDB is not usable in a lot of cases because it shows Japanese titles in Japanese text rather than English ones. Being able to choose the title language (I can do that with HamaTV) would be fantastic. That means I can get the American title (as I’d see in Crunchyroll) rather than the English-translated one.

Possible Fixes

Ways to fix these issues not entirely specific to anime:

1. Allow specifying the audio and subtitle language preferences per library.
2. Season-specific Specials should come in episode order after that season or be a separate “Season 01 Specials” that comes after “Season 01”. In terms of filenames, it would be s01se01 or ss01e01. Something to differentiate it from a regular season episode. This solves so many issues; it’s incredible. TVDB needs to fix their stuff though.
3. Anime movies, which are part of the continuing series and not a separate movie I’d watch outside of the show, should have a “season” designation. I’m asking that they be first-class citizens like in a movies library rather than as single-episode seasons. It looks so bad aesthetically the way it is today.
4. Add support for the Plex browser to show Season-specific Extras.
5. Add support for AniDB or MyAnimeList. Something that does a better job at categorizing anime per-season or per-disc. TVDB simply isn’t good enough in my opinion. This extends to the “Episode ordering” option as well.

Prior Art

Previous feature requests on the topic of an anime library:

• Add Anime on top level like Movies and TV Shows
• Anime - Library Type
• Library type ANIME
• Feature Request Anime Library

I noticed all these old threads are closed from some cleanup that happened years ago, but the issues are still there today. I shouldn’t have to struggle to figure out 3rd party software for something that should have native support.

Feature requests with similar needs:

• Add ANIME as an option when creating new Libraries, Or change "Fix Match"
• Option to position Series "specials" AFTER Seasons
• Season specific special features

[pshanew]

While not intending to denigrate your suggestions (which, in my opinion, are generally well thought out), I do have some ideas which might help.

Most of these concerns seem to deal with (perceived) deficiencies as to how Plex handles ordering of certain series-related items: Specials and movies related to a series. Plex has a built-in mechanism that automatically handles this problem; that is, it considers the release date for items when building Continue Watching and any smart objects (playlists and collections). This works for specials interleaved with regular season episodes as well.

As an example, for Continue Watching, when you begin an unwatched series from its start, the next item suggested will always be the next unwatched episode associated with that series, by release date. So, if you have a series where S01E01 - S01E24, then S00E01 - S00E03, and finally S02E01 - S02E20 aired (in that order), Continue Watching will honor that.

The same is true for a smart playlist or smart collection. For example, I currently have the following configured in my TV library:

(This has ‘By Release Date’ reverse-sorted.). Notice that there are specials interleaved with season 1. You get this for ‘free’ with both smart playlists and smart collections, when you sort by release date. I have this saved as a hub on my home screen named ‘Current TV Bing’ which currently looks like this:

One of my favorite things about smart objects is that they dynamically update. This particular example is configured to only show unwatched episodes so they fall off the collection as they are (fully) viewed.

The point here is that, as long as the online databases do the right thing with regard to release dates (and they more often than not do), all of this just works. Obviously, this requires that the items be extant in the databases and associated with the series.

To your fifth point, this also works for movies, if they’re in the online databases as specials for the series. For example, both TVDB and TMDB include Serenity as a special for the Firefly series. This is not guaranteed to occur for all series/movies though, but such movies could likely be added by users to the DBs when they are found to be missing.

As alluded to above, this functionality relies upon the online DBs data being correct (for a certain definition of ‘correct’). That is, specials, OVAs (a special class of special(s) or movie), and movies need to be accounted for. When the admins of the online DBs prove to be intransigent regarding certain series, Plex provides the means to manually manipulate data (which can be tedious). But really, that’s a problem to be solved with the online DBs; Plex Media Server and (most of its clients) provide a perfectly cromulent way of dealing with most of the ordering-related concerns you’ve raised.

You specifically mentioned collections as being unacceptable (and then “hacky” and “brittle,”) but these are exactly the types of problems they were designed to solve (at least the smart variety). Perhaps the manner in which these custom agents you mention use them is what’s hacky and brittle. My experience is that they’re more aptly described as powerful and flexible.

With regard to your fourth point, there’s nothing really to administer in the web client (or any other) with regard to extras at the season level or episode level. Aside from seeing the results of the addition of the files and refreshing of the metadata, there are no corrective actions you can take in any client (other than scanning a library or refreshing metadata). There is however an existing suggestion request to bring parity to this particular feature across all clients. If I can dig it up I’ll link it here.

Likewise for your possible fix for point five, I believe there’s an existing feature request to natively support additional, anime-specific online databases.

Obviously, none of this helps if your sole intended way of consuming your series is to access its page via its library.

Finally, and this is just a pet peeve, I’d recommend against using language such as “As a developer…” (as an anything, mostly, other than ‘user’) as it mostly comes across as condescending, especially when bolded. I doubt most people intend it this way, but it reads as “Hey, listen to me because I know things others don’t.”

[sawtaytoes]

Thanks so much for your response!

Smart Collections

I agree, you can create smart collections for episodes. I tried it and saw it actually put those Specials after the episodes, unlike the normal “Season” view.

I don’t always buy anime I wanna watch either. Some I buy to watch with my kids when they’re a bit older, but not today. And this means I have to go to that smart collection to watch the show, or I might miss out on specials.

There’s also no way my kids are gonna set up smart collections at their age in their account. That’s even more work for me to do. I already have to name all the episodes and features and organize everything; I’d rather not have to spend even more time customizing Plex. I’m supposed to watch and enjoy media, not spend all my time organizing it.

TVDB is wrong in some cases

If TVDB is really the source of truth here, I’d like to figure out how to update TVDB.

Here are some descriptions on OVAs from the One Punch Man disc:

A story set sometime between Mosquito Girl’s defeat and Genos showing up to Saitama’s apartment.

After the events of episode 4…

After the events of episode 7…

All of these show up separately in Specials and their “air date” is after Season 1. And after watching all the Specials for this series, I realized they should’ve been littered throughout the Season 1 episodes.

In this case, I’d say TVDB is wrong, but Plex doesn’t let me drag 'n drop episodes outside of Collections either, so I can’t fix it without fixing or adding to TVDB.

The Aired and DVD orders are correct, but they don’t match where these should chronologically go. I wish there was another sorting option for “Story Chronological”.

Movies mixed with shows

You said there’s a special case where movies can show up correctly right? Do you have a screenshot of that?

Other comments

I’m glad others are asking for support from AniDB and others. It would give me way more options. Even when using them, I’m still stuck to whatever TVDB does for sorting.

In general, I want to avoid doing custom stuff in Plex. I don’t mind making Collections for a series of movies. It helps thin my movies list too since I hide items in collections.

For shows, I could see making a collection from various seasons and movies, but it’s sub-par because there’s a watch-order I want to keep, and sometimes prequels are meant to be watched in that order. As you’re saying, a lot of this is on TVDB and others.

Custom Ordering

In the case TVDB doesn’t do it, I wanna be able to setup custom ordering in the same way I can reorder Collections. But this requires I have “Seasons: None”. That really depends on how I’m organizing things.

If I’m using American ordering (what you find on Western releases on disc), then I want Specials ordered inside of Seasons and ideally have that come from TVDB.

If I’m using Japanese ordering, then I want each Show to contain a single Season and for me to order Specials correctly in that Season. That also means movies would need to be counted as Movies, not Shows like they are today.

---

P.S. I removed that “as a developer” comment. You were completely right. Thanks for the help!

[pshanew]

@sawtaytoes

Thanks so much for your response!

You’re welcome!

Not to belabor the point, but I did want to address a couple of your concerns.

@sawtaytoes

And this means I have to go to that smart collection to watch the show, or I might miss out on specials.

@sawtaytoes

There’s also no way my kids are gonna set up smart collections at their age in their account. That’s even more work for me to do.

I kind of glossed over this in my original post, but you can administer smart collections on the server only and then choose where to publish them. In my earlier example, I just showed publishing the smart collection to my home screen. However, you can also configure (on the server) to publish the collection as a hub to your friends’ home screens as well (this includes managed users). This is done via Settings → [Server Name] → [Manage] Libraries.

By selecting ‘Friends’ Home’ on this screen, friends with whom you have shared this library (and who have pinned it) will see the hub on their home screen as a first-class hub, equal to all the others. They can even be reordered (relative to the other hubs in the same pinned library). Admittedly, there is still per-client configuration to be done, but nothing beyond what would normally be needed (pinning libraries and ordering them).

@sawtaytoes

If TVDB is really the source of truth here, I’d like to figure out how to update TVDB.

Here are some descriptions on OVAs from the One Punch Man disc:

I’ll certainly not dispute the point that TVDB (and TMDB) are sometimes wrong. However, looking at this specific example, they (TVDB) appear to have release dates which are interspersed across the existing seasons:

It may be that you need to configure the “Episode ordering” for the series in its advanced settings and select “TheTVDB (Aired)”:

Otherwise, by default, TMDB ordering will be used (the default for new libraries).

Overall though, I agree there are deficiencies in how this all is handled. Most of them seem (in my opinion) to be related to the quality of the data in the online DBs. (And Plex’s lack of support for TVDB’s “custom” orders). Based on what I’ve seen, folks seem to have lost interest in correcting both TMDB’s and TVDB’s anime problems because of those databases inflexibility.

@sawtaytoes

P.S. I removed that “as a developer” comment. You were completely right. Thanks for the help!

In hindsight, I should have left that out of my post, sorry. I’m appreciative that you didn’t call out my own condescension.

[sawtaytoes]

I made a new feature request with better info here: Better ordering and configuration for shows and movies.

I’m fine closing this topic.

[DeLasNoches]

@pshanew

will be used (the default for new libraries).

Overall though, I agree there are deficiencies in how this all is handled. Most of them seem (in my opinion) to be related to the quality of the data in the online DBs. (And Plex’s lack of support for TVDB’s “custom” orders). Based on what I’ve seen, folks seem to have lost interest in correcting both TMDB’s and TVDB’s anime problems because of those databases inflexibility.

I know this is old, but have you looked at using nfo files? I started a plex server during covid and a majority of my content are animes and I’ve been using custom nfo files. This allows me to put OVAs at the end of the season. I just add OVA to the title so it’s also clear.

Also if you’re worried about keeping episode numbers correct, you can also make season 2 folder start with the correct episode number.

I’d recommend also keeping the OVA at the end of their specific season as even though some do fit in between. I found most have spoilers for the season so if they are watched in the correct timeline they can give us information too early. Ex: Beyond the Boundary EP 0 which is OVA and Gargatia OVA which is also an ep 0. I also haven’t ran into too many OVA, I probably will with Slime but I believe Crunchyroll also orders the OVAs at the end of the season.

[sawtaytoes]

I would 100% like to use nfo files, but I’m not sure how to set them up for Plex, where to put the files, how to configure seasons and keep the nfo files up-to-date, etc.

My thinking is that I add the nfo files and then keep them up-to-date myself with some scripts I run in the background. The Plex agent and scanner is supposed to handle this for you though. I’m not versed in Python, and don’t really understand the difference between agents and scanners.

I thought the scanners were supposed to grab all files and directories, but there’s more to it than that. And then the agent simply looks up the info based on what the scanner found.

In this way, it’d be nice if I could take what the scanner found, lookup the info in the agent, and then tell Plex something completely different for how episodes and seasons are arranged.

One issue with ASS and HamaTV is I can’t “Watch List” anything in the Anime folder. So anything to fix that would be greatly appreciated. I pay all this money for physical media, but I don’t have an easy way to replicate what Crunchyroll is doing using Plex.

[DeLasNoches]

I don’t use any scripts.

I believe you would need the XMBC agent. Find that online and download it and follow the instructions of where to place the file properly in the Plex directory.

Nfo files + a bit of Plex editor? Is what I use.

First and foremost there is 2 ways to do this.

You can have each season of an anime as its own show. This will allow you to use a custom theme per season. Also you can use nfo files for the whole setup and don’t really need to use Plex editor.

I’ve used this before and like each season having its main opening song for theme song. The drawback was that I had issues organizing seasons. Season one, two, etc are easy to organize but animes with a different name each season can end up in alphabetical order instead. That and it took forever to scroll through shows.

Second way is to have all seasons in one show. This is helpful as you can use the Plex editor to give season names while keeping seasons in order. You will lose the ability to have a different theme per season and you’d have to enter a season description manually as well in the Plex editor. You’d get the rest of your information using nfo files.

Im using the second setup as of right now. I don’t care too much that I can’t pull season names or description from an nfo. I’ll just add seasons names via Plex. It’s a cleaner look to me. Plus it allowed me to handle a specific anime. The fruits of Grisaia.

It’s technically 2 seasons and 1 TV movie. I wanted to keep them together as the movie is in between the seasons and opens up season 2. I made the movie season 2 and season 2 season 3 in nfo files. I then used Plex editor to name each season as they had unique names.

I can give you my nfo and folder setup once I finish work. I’ve been very picky about my anime setup but for the most part prefer it over Crunchyroll.

[efalsken]

I settled on using the Absolute Series Scanner and adding database IDs to the folder names.

If you use [anidb-####] then each folder will show up as a series. [anidb3-####] or [anidb4-####] will combine the shows according to TVDB as seasons. Or inject the movies/specials into the shows in their right order. (sometimes)

The only downside of using this is that it gets rather slow if you have a large collection. And you can’t use sub-folders reliably (should always show as a collection) because sometimes it gets recognized as a series name.

There’s still the same problem of episode ordering mentioned above, but anidb at least makes it easier to match things up to a specific year/season. Sometimes that is pretty hard to do with just name/date matching. (I dare you to try to make Negima work without ID matching.)

Note that you can do the same thing for the plex-series matcher. You can use {tvdb-306304} in the folder names for TV series. Or you can use imdb or tmdb in movie folder names. (note that AbsoluteSeriesScanner uses {...} curly braces… plex series scanner uses [...] square brackets)

[DeLasNoches]

With episode ordering hmmm I know with nfo you can’t really handle episode like 6.5 for ex. Currently I don’t have any series like that. But with nfo I do like I can choose my order. OVA I can add at the end of the season which is usually where they belong. A perfect example for choosing episode order is The melancholy of haruhi suzumiya. I believe there’s 3 variations of how to watch that anime I stuck with the Blu ray release watch order as it’s chronological. With nfo you can use id numbers too but I just copy and paste. So nothing is getting pulled from other sites just directly all information and images get pulled from my server.

[DeLasNoches]

This is how my server looks like for an anime with multiple seasons. I pick the artwork, episode names, etc. I even took the time to look for the episode title artwork within the episode to use for thumbnails. I think it’s the finishing touch for me as I don’t see that on any streaming sites. This is a whole process but I think it’s worth it. I usually do it after a rip while I’m double checking I got subs and audio files ripped correctly. Folders are nicely organized.

[efalsken]

Epsiode Specials “like 6.5” go into the specials category. Plex doesn’t show it on the screen but the Air Date does get associated with them, and when watching the shows, it will interrupt the season order to show you a special, but only when it falls in between some episodes. Otherwise it will show the season specials at the end of the season.

Unfortunately, all of the “season specials” all get dumped into “Specials” when you use anidb3 or anidb4 or any of the tvdb modes.

If you use anidb mode, then each season shows up as its own show (with its own specials), which has its own plusses and minuses.

I use a combination of anidb, anidb3 and anidb4 depending on the show.

Oshi no Ko - TV1 (2023) [anidb3-17449]
Oshi no Ko - TV1 (2023) [anidb3-17449]/Specials/episode 07_5.mkv
Oshi no Ko - TV2 (2024) [anidb3-18086]

For the most part, TVDB does have “season” artwork that works properly. Anidb-artwork gets merged in automatically so you can choose between them easily. But for the most part, it works perfectly, and automatically, just like in your screenshot.

[DeLasNoches]

I haven’t really used specials but yeah i read that air dates will play in that order. I used to only have clean opening and clean closing in my specials but I’ve deleted almost all of them as they aren’t really watched.

I have OVA in the same season folder and played at the end.

Using nfo to organize episodes like 6.5, if it was really important id put it in the season honestly. From there the episode numbers would be off on the season and naming but then it’d still be in the right watch order which is what i think is overall better.

Artwork I grab from theTVDB usually look for a certain size as well and choose the best one. I usually look for the japanese version to make it more “authentic”.

I believe though that Plex instructions for seasonal art work is wrong on how to organize it.

Here’s a better upload of what I do for episode thumbnails as its a nice personal touch for myself. These can take the most time finding and rarely i do get some animes with no episode titles at all present.

[efalsken]

Some anime does not update episode titles very well in TVDB. Anidb usually has those details first. But keep in mind that often they aren’t even announced, or will be announced only the week before the episode airs. So you’ll often get “episode 04” in the databases with an air date sometimes months before the episode gets a name. I find that for those series, if you “refresh metadata” then the names will often show up once the episode is done airing.

Most people I know put OP/ED files into an Extras folder that is basically ignored by the scanner, for just the reason you mentioned. So it’s in my download if I really want to watch it, but it’s not in plex. Sometimes TVDB will assign them an episode number, but not very often. Anidb will give them a number since it’s more interested in cataloging every produced episode and featurette of every show.

Here’s what my setup did for Danmachi, since you used it as an example. This was zero extra work.

Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon
    Season 01 (2015) [anidb3-10894]
    Season 01.1 OVA (2016) [anidb3-11941]
    Season 01.2 Movie - Arrow of the Orion (2019) [anidb3-13830]
    Season 02 (2019) [anidb3-13829]
    Season 03 (2020) [anidb3-15111]
    Season 04 (2022) [anidb3-16032]
    Sword Oratoria (2017) [anidb3-11974]

FYI, you’ll see I put Sword Oratoria in there… in this case the AbsoluteSeriesScanner actually reads the parent folder as a collection and puts both series in the same group and correctly groups all the mainline series into one TV Series, but keeps Sword Oratoria separate.

[DeLasNoches]

@efalsken

pisode titles very well in TVDB

I check between theTVDB, IMBD and the subtitles from the blur ray as they can all 3 vary. Yeah OP/ED i juste deteled them. I experimented replacing the OP/ED into the episodes but I’d usually get frame issues doing so, no real idea why. Frame would hang on playback and then eventually get back but if you started right at the chapter it would play it normally.

I have used OP to get the theme song though. I’ve also experimented merging OP for several seaons and then converting the audio file into mp3 but it gave me issues as well for playback.

I haven’t used collection. I use the normal plex movie agent for anime movies and keep those seperate as most of the times they aren’t cannon.

I honestly got annoyed with specials that’s why I removed them lol hated seeing them.

And I can’t stand those thumbnails, they jsut seem to random for me, idk why.

[sawtaytoes]

@DeLasNoches I’ve never heard of the XMBC agent. I’ll check into that!

Separate Shows per Season + Collections

In terms of separate Plex videos for each season, you can do that with Collections. As soon as you add collections around each one, you can have stuff in collections not show up in your main list (collections are first-class citizens):

I’m using ASS and HamaTV with aniDB folders (like @efalsken), but I don’t get different themes. Typically, “season 2” will have the same music as “season 1” for some reason even though they’re separate folders.

Watchlist issues

I can’t add anything to my watch list. That feature is completely missing with these agents using the anidb IDs.

Sometimes, I wanna mark something to watch next, but since I can’t, I’ll forget.

Collection Organization

One benefit of this approach is you can click 'n drag these around and order them however you want whenever you want. I’ve sometimes found a better season/OVA order and was able to quickly make changes. You can also add movies wherever they go so long as they’re not in-between episodes.

Special Episode placement is fincky

Some OVAs/Movies go between episodes in a season.

If you don’t do that properly, you’ll be very confused wondering why certain characters are still alive and what time period this story is taking place. These are in the correct order on disc, but not in Plex.

You can see that easily with Re:ZERO:

Here, the second season has “2 episodes”, but it’s actually 2 movies. One is a 1-hour special that goes after episode 12, and the other is a full-length movie that goes after the first season. Because of the anidb listing, the movie that comes after the first season isn’t a first-class citizen even though it should have its own entry and poster.

Ideally, I’d be able to re-number episodes in season 1 such that the 1-hour OVA becomes episode 13 and all other episodes are +1 episode number. Even better is if Plex natively supports outta-order episode numbers. Then I could put the OVA in there and not mess up episode numbering.

Another option, and I think this is the better option, is making the “episode 13 OVA” its own 1-episode show. Then it could have a poster, and the rest of the season gets split after, but it can retain the show’s episode numbering. It sucks from a poster standpoint, but it can help place in-season movies like this where they go.

That’s not always the right solution though, and I’d like both options:

1. Mix OVAs between episodes forgoing the episode numbers (One Punch Man has 6 OVAs, and they’re sprinkled throughout the 12-episode season).
2. Split seasons and put OVAs between, so you can get a nice poser and retain episode numbering.

Cours become 2 shows

Cours show up as separate “seasons”. I don’t like this.. It’s especially bad with Attack on Titan:

People often don’t make posters for the cours either, so you wind up with weird listings where cours are broken up with the same poster and hard-to-read season names.

Specials are better in separate shows

You can benefit from having each season as a separate show because of Specials. Those special episodes are specific to certain seasons, so it makes sense to include them as part of the season rather than the whole series. With the Show-Season view you can’t organize specials; they all get lumped together regardless of which season they’re a part of.

Specials playing back between shows

As @efalsken said, I’ve also experienced one show where it plays specials between episodes, but because they’re not listed that way in the season, you’ll into issues:

If I end the night on episode 4 and come in tomorrow, I will manually click “Play” on Episode 5. What Plex wants me to do is click “Play” on episode 4, get to the end, and have the agent magically play one of the specials. If specials are to be mixed with the show, then they should appear that way in Plex rather than magically playing back in a certain order.

Conlusion

I think my point in all this is I want more choices. It’s my library, so I should be able to order it the way I want. That should be a reasonable thing to assume for my library. I bought all this stuff, I can watch it in whatever order I want, and I want Plex to help me make that happen.

I don’t want to have to remember the correct watch order. I have hundreds of shows. That’s too much for me nor do I want to have a text file open with the episode ordering just to watch something. This is where Plex can help. Provided we can implement most of these features, we can let Plex do the heavy-lifting, and we can simply enjoy our content the way we want.

Questions from me

1. @efalsken What do you mean “it gets rather slow if you have a large collection”? Slow in performance? Scanning? organizational time?

2. Note that you can do the same thing for the plex-series matcher. You can use {tvdb-306304} in the folder names for TV series. Or you can use imdb or tmdb in movie folder names. (note that AbsoluteSeriesScanner uses {...} curly braces… plex series scanner uses [...] square brackets)
   @efalsken

   I’m using square brackets with AbsoluteSeriesScanner. Am I not supposed to?

3. I’ve never used anything other than [anidb-XXXXX]. I didn’t even know you could organize them into seasons like you did. But even still, is there any way to use that and solve the problems I presented?
   a. Always plays the season 1 theme song in other seasons/shows.
   b. OVAs not being mixed in with episodes or the inability to split a season/show in 2, so I can make the movie a first-class citizen. This fixes the episode numbering problem, but posters get wonky in that case.
   c. Unable to merge 2 cours into a single season/show.

[DeLasNoches]

Well if you want complete order control go nfo. Like I said in an earlier post Fruits of Grisaia are 3 seasons, imo. 2 full seasons and a 1 tv movie speical which needs to be watched before season 2. The TV movie doesn’t come up when i had plex look for its info in movies so i adjusted my seasons in my nfo files and have it as season 2 in the show

for watchlist issues, i don’t have that either but you can’t make a playlist and title the playlist watchlist?

I might have to check collections again but have already been merging animes into one show lol

You could add the movie in as a special, rename the specials thru the plex app to the movie name and also add it’s custom poster.

" To add a custom poster image for particular Seasons in a show, name the image file as follows:

• /TV Shows/ShowName/Season XX/SeasonXX.ext

Where XX is the season number. If you’re specifying the poster for a “Specials” season, use season-specials-poster instead."

I just can’t get this to work for me.

[efalsken]

@sawtaytoes You’re right about the square brackets. I had them reversed in my explanation. You’ll see i had it correct in the examples. I actually submitted this as an enhancement request to the AbsoluteSeriesScanner just this morning to consolidate with the plex scanner.

My collection is about 40tb among 4000 distinct seasons/specials and movies. Scanning takes a while (about 5 minutes). And if I put things into “collection folders” it takes a LOT longer. (30 minutes).

I used to do exactly as you do with each folder as a season + show. But things like you mentioned is what convinced me to do it otherwise. Try this:

Attack on Titan - TV1 (2013) [anidb4-9541]
Attack on Titan - TV2 (2017) [anidb4-10944]
Attack on Titan - TV3 Part 01 (2018) [anidb4-13241]
Attack on Titan - TV3 Part 02 (2019) [anidb4-14444]
Attack on Titan - TV4 Part 01 (2020) [anidb4-14977]
Attack on Titan - TV4 Part 02 (2022) [anidb4-16177]
Attack on Titan - TV4 Part 03 (2023) [anidb4-17303]
Attack on Titan - Movie 1+2 (2014-2015) [anidb4-10583]
Attack on Titan - Movie 3 - Roar of Awakening (2018) [anidb4-13546]
Attack on Titan - Movie 4 - Chronicle (2020) [anidb4-15582]
Attack on Titan - OAD (2013-2018) [anidb4-9826]

You’ll see that it ALMOST pulls everything together perfectly. You still get the separation of episodes in folders according to database season, but it maps up to TVDB and you get proper seasons, episodes in their right place (for example, each folder has episodes numbered 01 to 12, but they’ll map “part 2” correctly to “episodes 13-24”). I use anidb4 in the above, so that the movies are inserted in-between seasons. But if it bugs you that “Season 3” isn’t showing as the 3rd season, then use anidb3.

You’ll see that I use TV1, TV2 instead of “season 1” because quite often S2 is not the second, etc. But also Plex and AbsoluteSeriesScanner are really hung up on the term “season” and they get particular about mapping it as “season 02”. Honestly, once you start tagging your folders, you can use whatever ordering you wish in the rest of the folder name. Sometimes it’s so confusing I have to use the watch-order:

Monogatari - 01 - TV - Bakemonogatari (2009) [anidb-6327]
Monogatari - 02 - TV - Nisemonogatari (2012) [anidb-8658]
Monogatari - 03 - TV - Second Season (2013) [anidb-9183]
Monogatari - 04 - OVA - Tsukimonogatari (2014) [anidb-10891]
Monogatari - 05 - OVA - Hanamonogatari (2014) [anidb-10046]
Monogatari - 06 - TV1 - Owarimonogatari (2015) [anidb-11350]
Monogatari - 07 - TV2 - Owarimonogatari (2017) [anidb-13033]
Monogatari - 08 - Movie - Zoku Owarimonogatari (2018) [anidb-13691]
Monogatari - 09 - Movies - Kizumonogatari (2016-2017) [anidb-8357]
Monogatari - 10 - Special - Nekomonogatari Black (2012) [anidb-9453]
Monogatari - 11 - Web - Koyomimonogatari (2016) [anidb-11827]

@DeLasNoches
Fruit of Grisaia was particularly aggravating. It looks like you’re missing Phantom Trigger. Using anidb4 mode, does exactly as you did but without any extra work, and for the most part picks up the season posters perfectly.

The “Watch List” feature of Plex does not work for custom media. It only works if you use the Plex Movie or Show scanner.

NOTE There are a few edge cases that can be tricky to handle.

• If you have file names like Golden Kamuy S2 - 14.mkv in your folders, you can override this with the anidb tag like this: Golden Kamuy - TV2 (2018) [anidb3-14185-s01]. The way this reads it is season 01 of anidb-14185, then mapped to the second season of the tvdb-XXXXXX.
• If you have file numbers in your folder of ep14-26, then sometimes I want to map them as S2 or S1 part 2, but they’re different anidb numbers, then you can use something like this: (which will offset the episode numbers to match the anidb database numbering, THEN map the result to TVDB seasons) In this case because I was too lazy and didn’t want to rename all 12 episodes in Part2 because the distro I was using named them S1E12-23, while they were clearly 2 different entries in ANIDB (for the episode names and metadata).

86 - TV1 Part1 (2021) [anidb3-15441]
86 - TV1 Part2 (2021) [anidb3-16172-e-11]

[DeLasNoches]

@efalsken

g. It looks like you’re missing Phantom Trigger.

I only have what i buy on blue ray, my collection isn’t that big at all. Been using NFO files from the start so i can add really only what i want to see. Esp thumbnails, i hate random episode thumbnails idk why.

Is this how we are supposed to name the file for specials poster “season-specials-poster”?

I couldn’t get it to work, I got the seasons to work. Only noticed that in their example they should that the image file could be within the season folder but for me it only worked outside of the season folder.

[sawtaytoes]

This is all beyond me. I’m gonna PM you since I have more questions now, and those’re too specific for this feature request.

What I know is that you need a custom agent to get Plex to do what you want. We shouldn’t need 3rd party agents to get this working, and Plex marks agents as “Legacy”, so they intend for us to only use their agents. I’d love to do that, but they’d have to step up their game in terms of episode and season ordering for that to happen.

I just hope that sometime in the future, we don’t suddenly lose access to custom agents.