Is there any chance of having the ability to make multi-part episodes show as one episode?
This is an absolutely infuriating practice of TheTVDB - for example, the just released Spongebob Kamp Koral.
TheTVDB lists as 11 episodes, when in reality there are only 6 episodes, with 5 of them being two-parts.
Why they insist on these being separate episodes, when in reality they are one episode with multiple stories, makes no sense to me.
This is the same for all multi-part cartoon shows (Doug, Hey Arnold, etc).
Please tell me I am not the only who hates this. There is no easy to deal with this, short of manually splitting the episodes with MKVMerge (so tedious) or naming the episodes with multiple names (S01E01E02), which is less than ideal.
I am right there with you.
I also don’t understand why these sites decide to take one episode with multiple segments and split them out.
However, I don’t think this will be fixed with the new scanner, unfortunately.
I personally name the episodes as they should actually be and then manually correct the metadata in Plex so that the segments are combined for the episodes. I have ways of doing this more “automatically” directly in the database via SQL (not recommended by Plex, just want to point that out).
I have thought about this for a while and wanted to try and make a scanner and/or agent to deal with this but there really is no good/easy way to know to combine the episodes, unless you treat it like a multi-part episode with the file have s##e01-e02 and then use that to combine the metadata for Plex, but I personally don’t like that naming for the file.
Also, for Kamp Koral, it’s not just TheTVDB but TMDB did that as well.
Can you share your SQL methods? That sounds like an interesting approach to this issue.
I noticed TMDB did the same as well for Kamp Koral.
I’d love to have a conversation with whoever made that decision to understand their rationale, it truly does not make sense in any way you look at it.
As shark2k pointed out… that’s not so much about the scanner/agent but how those episodes are displayed. There’s a dedicated feature suggestion (and a whole lot of duplicates) to address this behavior.
Please stay on-topic within this thread and discuss the “display issue” in that suggestion or a separate thread Edit: Moved those posts to a separate thread to address this – apologies for the inconvenience.
