Disc Season Episodes are Specials according to TvDB

[eidylon]

I’m adding Star Wars Rebels, through S2 now. For both S1 and S2, the first two episodes (according to the discs) of each season are actually episodes in the “Specials” season according to TvDB. So, when they show up in plex, if I name them to match tvdb, then the first two episodes of each season are all grouped under Specials, and then the seasons continue in the actual season (S1, S2, etc.).

Of course this makes watching them difficult, because you’d need to know to watch a couple episodes from S0, then watch S1, then a couple more S0, then S2, etc. No one knows to do that.

I’ve had this with a couple other shows, and what I’ve done in the past is just combine those episode into a single #0 episode in the respective “right” season, as s01e00, etc., but then of course I need to enter all the metadata for that episode manually.

So I’m wondering is there a better way to go about addressing this? So even though the episodes show in S0 according to TvDB, I could somehow get them to show up in the “right” spot in plex?

Maybe some way to put two different episode #s in the name, one for metadata, one for ordering, something like
“Star Wars Rebels - s00e05 - s01e00, Part 1 - Spark of Rebellion.mkv”
“Star Wars Rebels - s00e06 - s01e00, Part 2 - Spark of Rebellion.mkv”
where the first e# is used to look up metadata while the second e# is used to order the episode in Plex’s library?

Another show that has this issue regularly is the Christmas specials for Doctor Who.

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[pshanew]

Have you tried using the DVD order available on TheTVDB?
https://www.thetvdb.com/series/star-wars-rebels/seasons/dvd/1
https://www.thetvdb.com/series/star-wars-rebels/seasons/dvd/2

That ordering shows the episodes you mention at the start of their respective seasons. For the best results you may want to combine the two-part episodes into single files using the instructions here, as they’re considered single, longer episodes:

[HowTo]: joining multi-part movies files with MKVtoolnix GUI

The purpose of this HowTo is to join videofiles, when a movie was ripped and split into two or more files. (This happens usually with very long movies [i.e. LOTR] or more often back in the day when we had Video CD or DIVX CDs) The ultimate goal is to have the movie back in one file, so there is no trouble in the various Plex clients which do not support multi-part files. The tool used is MKVtoolnixGUI it is freely available for all major PC operating systems. Therefore the container format …

To use DVD order in Plex Media Server, open edit the properties for the series at the show-level and set the Episode ordering to DVD order on the advanced tab:

[eidylon]

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh! I think that may have been the missing piece. I knew about that setting in the show properties in Plex, and I had tried changing it there, but it didn’t seem to do anything.

I did NOT know about that separate option/tab in tvdb. I’ll have to play around with this again, and see if I can get that working.

The multi-part combining is no problem, that I do know how to do I generally just do the “, Part 1”, “, Part 2” on separate files.

Thanks for pointing to that other section.
I’ll report back how that goes.

[eidylon]

Okay… that seems to have worked - mostly. It had a number of issues at first, so I had to move the entire show out of my library folder, empty the trash, rescan, then move it back in and rescan the library, that whole dance. Now everything is showing right, and matching up with the discs, EXCEPT for the first episode. For some reason, it is giving e1 the same metadata as e2.

Here’s how my files are named…

As far as I can tell, they are named correctly.

Plex IS picking up the files correctly… If I look at the info for e1, it shows the right files…

, and it shows the episode as being the proper 45ish minutes long.

But for some reason, it is not matching up the metadata for that ONE episode to what tvbd says…

All the other episodes are working and matching fine.
I’ve tried repeatedly doing “refresh metadata” on both the episode and the show.
But plex is insisting e1 has the same metadata as e2…

Any idea on that one file? Or do I still need to go in and update its metadata manually?

[pshanew]

Did you perform the full Plex Dance?

The Plex Dance ™

The purpose of this is to remove all cached metadata and xml data for an item that Plex usually keeps. This helps when you want to “start from scratch” for particular item move all files for the media item out of the directory your Library is looking at, so Plex will not “see” it anymore scan the library library (to detect changes) empty trash clean bundles (in menu next to server name, when accessed under ‘More’) double check naming schema and move files back scan the library Support articl…

In your description above you left out an important step: Clean bundles. Unless you’re positive you did it already, I’d recommend going through the full dance again. And make sure to set the show back to DVD order.

[eidylon]

I’d learned about the Plex dance from word of mouth, and yeah, I was unaware of the “clean bundles” step.

Redid the whole thing again from the beginning - including bundles now, and put the show back to DVD Order - but it’s still having the same issue. Even tried cycling the order around a few times, then back to DVD Order, allowing it to finish re-scanning after each change.

Season 1

Season 2

Fortunately, I think seasons 3 and 4 were done normally, but it would be nice to get 1 and 2 working.

Just to rule out something with the two-part file, I moved out part 2, and renamed part 1 as if it were a single file. Then re-scanned again. Tried refreshing the metadata on the first episode, too.

[pshanew]

Interesting. I just performed a test with some dummy files and saw the same thing. Actually, I was able to get S01E01 to just show up as Episode 1 with no metadata once, by dancing just that episode. The logs show it as pulling the DVD order, but it doesn’t pull the correct metadata which matches. I’m not sure what’s going on, sorry.

[eidylon]

ARGH! Dang it. I realize I may have named the parts not quite right according to the instructions here Naming and Organizing Your TV Show Files | Plex Support , so I fixed them, did the whole dance, still nothing.

So I finally gave in… and just multiplexed them together into one file with MKVtoolnix. Re-did the whole dance, AGAIN, … and … nope! It still doesn’t get the metadata for s01e01 and s02e01 . Although, now at least, it DOES see them as different from sXXe02 .

So, I don’t know… there must be something strange with this show.

[eidylon]

AAAHHHHH!!! Just as one last thing, I tried flipping the order back to “Aired” order, and then back to “DVD” order, … letting it complete a full scan between each, and now it is back to picking up the metadata for sXe02 and using that for sXe01 again. … sigh

Manual entry of the metadata for those episodes it is, I guess.