I have a television series whose episode order differs in its online presentation versus its TheTVDB/Plex metadata order. It’s a children’s series, and so the norm is that one episode file = two episode segments, thus it’s a multi-episode file.
The filenames are of the following format
Show Name - S02E01E05
Show Name - S02E02E06
Show Name - S02E03E04
You can see that the first two files have non-contiguous episodes. Plex incorrectly interprets the noncontiguous episode number as being a range of episodes, thus, if I click in to S02E04, and check view info, I see all three files – the first file scans as E01, E02, E03, E04, and E05; the second file scans as E02, E03, E04, E05, and E06; and the third file scans as E03 and E04.
This is replicable using dummy files in the current version of Plex Server. I struggle as to whether this is a bug or not. The Naming article describes this behaviour as perhaps unintentionally intentional. In that sense, it should be unsurprising that this occurs. But given that there is no solution for non-contiguous multi-episode files and given that the behaviour is a little hard to decipher at first, I think it qualifies as a bug. There is no solution except to split the files into multiple files, which is what I will likely eventually do.
Perhaps one solution would be to disambiguate single-file multi-episode behaviour such that “E03-E05” is a range and “E03E05” is a list of two episodes, though of course this might annoy people who rely on the latter’s current behaviour. Crucially, though, most multi-episode files will be contiguous and would not be impacted by changing the behaviour. Just a thought, I am sure the UX people and Metadata people can have a chew on this and come up with a better solution than I can.
