I’ve done a small search to see if this is covered, but haven’t seen anything:
I’m trying to create a “TV Show” out of bonus content that came with my discs. Specifically, I have DVDs of old Saturday Night Live seasons and they occasionally will add a “Best of” show (ex: Best of John Belushi, Best of Will Farrell, etc.) as bonus content. Rather than throwing them randomly into the season they came with (and have a hard time finding them when I want to watch them), I’d like to consolidate all the “Best of…” into a TV Show I create called “The Best of SNL” and load all those movies there. Since there is no Best of SNL in IMDB, the server software is ignoring this folder I created and not showing it in my library. Is there a way to create a show and add episodes so that I can accomplish what I’m trying to do?
Thank you!
What I did was create an “other” library, called it “Best of SNL” and added the videos there. The server software won’t usually be able to come up with a poster/description for the video but you can easily add that manually
As long as you name your files exactly like a regular tv show, you can create custom tv shows and place them into your regular tv show library.
You might have to check and resolve the mismatch that very likely will occur on your files.
“Split” and “Unmatch” are your friends here.
Of course, these extras are then only available in this custom tv show, not anymore as local extras in their source show.
(Unless you want to place copies of the videos, or start messing with hard links/symbolic links in your media storage volume.)
You can indeed “make up” a show, like Otto said. Give it a name, give it a year (include the year in the folder name, just like you would all other shows according to Otto’s link). Number each episode with season and episode numbers (you can probably get away with making up a “specials” season zero and put them all there. If you do NOT include a number in a filename (such as a file named “SNL - Best of Jim Belushi.mp4”), Plex purposefully ignores any file without a number, since it would be unable to connect that file up to one on online databases.
-Otto’s option: Un-merge and unmatch the new show
As Otto mentioned, is that you are likely to have your made-up show auto-merged as a “duplicate” of an existing show. Plex will do its best to select a show based on the name, and it might see it as a duplicate and combine it. When this happens, you must find the show it combined into and “split” the two shows apart. This can be done fairly easily by going into your library in a browser or mouse-based client, and changing the sort options. Change “TV Shows” in the All> TV Shows> By Title> sort at the top left of the window to “Episodes”. Once this is done, you can now change the “All” sort to “Duplicates”, to see which show your custom episodes merged with. Now go to that show itself (not the individual episodes), click the triple dot, and there should be a “Split Apart” option in this menu. Back out to the main library view (change the filters back to normal, and find your un-merged entry. I think it will probably show as a second copy of the existing show, but the episode count will be smaller than the regular show. Select the triple dot menu on THIS show, and nor choose “unmatch”. It should now show up with no metadata, and you can customize it to your liking, including a new name, descriptions and titles for each episode, and posters.
-Alternate option: Use TheTVDB
TheTVDB usually has much greater support for special episodes such as you describe having. Especially if they are DVD extras. Browse their SNL Specials season entry to see if your extra is already known. If they have all your specials, you can include them pretty easily into your existing SNL show library by marking the episode as a “special” using the Special season zero. You will probably have to change the show itself to use TVDB’s numbering system instead of the library-wide default of TheMovieDB in order for Plex to pick these up.
-Alternate alternate option: Use TheMovieDB
Checking just now, TMDB ALSO has a lot of support for DVD specials. In fact, the “Best of Jim Belushi” special is on there, whereas TVDB does NOT have that special. If this is the case, don’t do anything other than simply adding a “S00Exx” number at the start of your DVD specials, and plop them into a “Specials” folder in your SNL folder. Plex will pick these up, pull metadata for them, and bam. A separate area for your specials.
Really grateful for the replies and insight.
Based on the feedback I ended up with a simple solution of just creating a season 00 and then renamed the files based on standard naming policy (episode - s00e01). Then I went in and renamed each file to reflect the actual title of the special. Interestingly, this had obviously been done before with SNL because it immediately started auto-filling in the names of the specials. After I renamed them, it was no problem but the image used to reflect the episode/special didn’t reflect my naming configuration - Jane Curtain was never in The Best of Adam Sandler! I know I can screen shot an image and change it under the file data, but I’m satisfied enough where I am.
Again, thank you for the help!
I’m curious what episode number you chose for the Adam Sandler special. There exists one, and it is S00E09. TMDB’s thumbnail for it is a picture of adam sandler on a guitar.
If you just picked a number at random (or starting at 1) in the S00Exx range, then you are over-writing an existing episode, and the title/description/thumbnail will be from that episode, not yours. Consider browsing TheMovieDB’s page for SNL’s specials and assign your files the episode number that matches your file contents. You may have some gaps in the numbers, but that is common for Specials seasons, as for me it includes specials I have no interest in, such as “making of” or cast interviews.
Edit: But if you are happy with this, then that’s fine. I believe that even though Plex downloads a thumbnail image for each episode, it also auto-generates one from the file itself, and can be found as an alternate “poster” in the Plex interface. You can edit the episode with the pencil icon to change the thumbnail/poster and there should be an auto-generated one in that list.
