I’d like to suggest the ability to customize the episode order of seasons, as well as adding multiple different orders per season. I’d also wish that this would be not limited to episodes from the same season, but rather allow any type of video file to be included in the order.
This would be handy in the following situations:
–Episodes from the same season:
There might be a preferred order by the fans, which is not the order on TVDB.
Episodes might be triggering for the user.
A season might have a random order, and users would like to have a specific order in their library (consider the Netflix show Kaleidoscope, which shows the first seven episodes in random order).
–Episodes from same show, different season:
Especially helpful with episodes which are considered specials, but are still critical to the story and should be watched before/after a specific regular episode.
–Episodes from different show:
Helpful with shows that have a companion series, e.g. RuPaul’s Drag Race and the corresponding RuPaul’s Drag Race Untucked. It would be great to have both a ‘Drag Race Only’ order as well as a ‘Drag Race + Untucked’ order on each season of the main show.
–Movies:
Some special episodes are actually full fledged movies, but they still should be seen within the regular shows order as they are critical to the overall story.
From a UI perspecitve, these could be shown as tabs on larger screens or drop-downs on smaller ones.
Have you checked if your show has your preferred order as part of one of the other currently supported episode orders (e.g. TheTVDb’s DVD or absolute order, TMDb order)? There’s an existing suggestion discussing for Plex to support more of the available orders from those repositories.
Much of what you’ve been describing can alternatively be done with episode collections (assuming it’s all about content from within 1 library) or playlists (will also work for cross-library content). This is already being discussed in another existing suggestion – so maybe you want to comment/vote in that thread in order to help us avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes (in which case I’ll close this thread as a duplicate).
The same goes for Plex to display special episodes inline with the regular episodes between which they aired.
TVDB etc. might have a different order, but that is not always the case (my example with Drag Race would not work with these, as they are technically two shows that belong together). I also believe that there will always be cases where none of the agents offer an order that fits a user’s needs. Allowing a manual override will always be a solution for all cases. After all, it is the user’s library and it should fit their needs.
Neither playlists nor collections are a viable option in my opinion:
Collections cannot be nested. This leads to extra clutter in the library’s overview, especially if every season would need its own collection.
Many users share their libraries. Communicating that there is a different order in a complete different place is futile, and also increases the mental load for every user. In my opinion, the alternative orders should be where they make most sense, that means at the season overview.
Playlists are also no alternative. One cannot resume play from the last played item (at least on GoogleTV). Video playlists easily exceed multiple hours of continuous play, easily being longer than 24 hours. Not being able to continue is a huge disadvantage.
Again, the same problem as with collections occur: They are at a completely different place in the UI. Even worse, they cannot be added to collections, making it even worse.
And, to be quite frank, playlists are currently the unloved step-child of features within plex.
The other Suggestions you linked are valid, I feel that my suggestion would also include these suggestions while even adding more flexibility not discussed in both of them (e.g. adding movies, having multiple orders available on seasons etc.).
