I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I have two collections: one for the One Chicago shows (Chicago Fire, Med, and PD) and the other for the Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19 universe tv shows.
The first thing I noticed, is while I can sort Movie Collections by Release date I can also play the movies in the collection in that order. The issue is that the TV Show collection order is also set to Release Date but I do not see a way to play all the episodes across the shows in the collection by release date. Can anyone tell me how I can do this? Is there a way to list the all episodes in the TV Show collection and not have them sub-grouped by Show?
As a workaround, I have created two Smart Playlists with filters on the Show Collection and the Episode Unplayed is true. I then sorted the playlist by Release Date. For the most part, this gave me the correct list of episodes however, episodes with the same air date are not sorting by air time. So Grey’s Anatomy is listed before Station 19 even though station 19 airs before Grey’s anatomy. For the One Chicago Playlist, the order is Chicago Fire, Med, and then PD but the actual air time is Med first, then Fire and PD. It seems the secondary sort is on the show name.
I am hoping there is a setting somewhere that will allow me to correct this sort-order issue. Is there an advanced sort option? Or can you configure the Air Date/Release Date field to be a Date/time field instead of just a date field?
In the Collection, I see there is an option to use “Custom” as the collection order but would this propagate over to smart playlists? Or would it allow me to get the order right on the Collection page?
How do you sort episodes with the same air date in the correct air time order?
You can’t. A Tv Show collection is at the Show level so that’s how things are sorted. You need to create an episodes collection with the episodes you want. To save yourself from manually picking the episodes, I would suggest a smart collection.
Thank you for your response.
When you say a Smart collection, do you mean a Smart Playlist or is this something separate? If separate, how do you create an Episode Smart Collection? If the same as a Smart Playlist, I already did this but the issue is I need it sorted by episode air time as the shows have the same air date. Please advise.
It’s something separate and was only released about a month ago – so relatively new.
From an advanced filter you can now create smart playlists or collections.
There’s some minor differences compared to “regular” collections, such as the order being defined when specifying the filters (giving you much more flexibility) or smart collections not hiding their items.
Edit:
Including an example. The type of the collection (show, season, episode) will depend on the display mode when you edit your advanced filter.
Here:
It is sorting Chicago Fire, Med then PD but the shows airs Chicago Med, Fire and then PD. Because they always crossing over, I would like the sort order to be the same as the airing time.
Would I fix this using a Custom Sort? If so, can someone tell me how to use the Custom Sort on Collections?
Plex does not store aired time, only aired date. It will not be possible to sort it the way you want.
Oh I am now seeing this.
Can it be a feature request? Change Release Date to a Date and Time field instead of a Date only field? Or can I request a custom sort field where I can set my own sort order by numbers
I see there is a Custom Sort for Collections. I cannot figure out how to use it. Would the Custom sort allow me to sort by the underlying TV Shows. For example, If I set Chicago Med to 1, Fire to 2 and PD to 3, when I sort by Release Date, it would sort the episodes by Med, Fire and PD.
Also Is it possible to request Collections to be editable after creating them? Right now you can edit the filter but not the rest of the collection. If there is no other fix, then if I can edit the Collections after creating them, I can just drag and drop the episodes and manually sort them as I need when new episodes are added.
It’s already possible. If you edit an episode there is a “sort title” field. Then when you sort episodes by title, it will use this field instead of the actual “title” field.
It’s already possible. If you edit an episode there is a “sort title” field. Then when you sort episodes by title, it will use this field instead of the actual “title” field.
So say I edit the Sort title for each episode and place a 01 for Med, 02 for fire, and 03 for PD. And then I sort my Collection by Release Date. Currently, it is sorting the episodes with the same release date by Show title. Would the Sort Title for each episode override this so that it sorts by the sort title after the Release date? I need the first sort by Release Date. Can I use the Sort Title as my second sort criteria?
No, if you want to use the sort title, you need to sort by title. So you can’t just add 1, 2, 3. You’ll need to go through every episode and keep numbering them 4, 5, 6, etc. You cannot have 2 sort criteria.
But I think I figured it out. So the Collections is sorting by Release Date and Then by Show Title. So I went and edited the Chicago TV shows and updated the Sort Title Fields to “01 Chicago Med”, “02 Chicago Fire” and “03 Chicago PD”. I then went back to my Smart Episode Collection and they were automatically resorted Med, Fire and PD. So it the same as it is when it actually airs.
Thank you all for assisting.
I will monitor for next week to make sure that when the new shows add, they continue in the correct sort order.
Well, at least it works for what I need for now. The only thing that would break this is when the TV network decides to switch around the order on the shows’ airing time on a given week only. There is no way to change the order of the collection after creating it.
So I don’t know if Plex can bring in the airtime data easily, The Movie Database and TV Database that are sourced for metadata don’t show airtime, only airdate.
