Many childrens cartoons have multiple shorts per episode… Curious george, Garfield and friends, Heathcliff, etc… and often thetvdb lists each of these shorts as separate episodes.
To get the metadata correctly from thetvdb, I have to name the files as such:
S01E01-02
S01E03-04
S01E05-06
etc…
This works great for getting the episode metadata correctly from thetvdb.com, however, when it auto-plays, each episode plays twice before it moves on to the next episode.
I understand some people may want a file to play twice in a playlist… but could you prevent the same file from playing twice in a row when just auto-playing through a season?
UPDATE
Since comments make it evident that this is a limitation… for now i’m fixing it by splitting the movie… maybe later Plex will support multi-episodes a little better, at which time i can re-join my episodes.
ffmpeg and a batch script made quick work of it… here’s a sample command which splits without re-encoding, thus keeping original quality:
I’m pretty sure it’s not. The limitation (as I understand it) is that you can’t jump to midway through the episode file, i.e. clicking on the second of a two-part ‘single file’ episode will always play from the beginning of the file, but Plex should be smart enough to know which episodes it’s played and jump to the correct file for the next episode.
I’ve just tested a show where the first episde is a 3-parter. I have all 3 episodes within one file with S0101-E03 in the filename. When I watch it (regardless whether I select episode 1, 2, or 3 to play) when it finishes Plex will auto-play episode 4 next.
That’s not what the limitation is. If you attempt to play any individual episode within the affected file, it will play the entire file from the beginning, not the start of the episode selected. It doesn’t have anything to do with the playing of subsequent episodes not in the same file.
So, in your example, if you just select S01E02 to play, it will start with S01E01. This would affect auto-play as well. The first time through, it will play every episode in the file. Then, when it attempts to play episode two, it will again play every episode in the file. And so on.
The issue is honestly something Plex could solve at the server level. Just give the user the ability to manually specify the time code where an episode division is, and treat them as two separate episodes. Just start payback at the break when playing the later episode.
This is not behaviour I’ve observed. When I play a multi part episodes and it gets to the end Plex will play the correct next episode. It doesn’t replay the same episode.
Exactly, progress while playing the combined S01E01E02 file is reflected on BOTH E01 and E02 items, and if its finished BOTH are marked as watched and it will continue with E03.
No, this is no real solution, if multipart episodes are a real double or triple feature (not simply 3 episodes with credits and such within the same file).
