How can I fix Plex organization of shows and movies?

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How do you fix organizing tv shows and movies together?

Anime is my #1 concern, but it also affects all the kids shows like Pocoyo, Curious George, and others which makes it hard for my wife to find stuff for the kids to watch that I’ve already ripped off discs.

I’ve used HamaTV and Absolute Series Scanner together, but they have some deficiencies.

How do you solve these issues?

  1. I want a way to have movies and shows in the same series with proper naming.
  2. I want to be able to be able to take specials from that season or series and put them between episodes.
  3. I want to be able to take movies and put them between episodes.

My first idea was creating a feature request for getting named seasons, but since that functionality may never get implemented and could take years, I’m looking for alternative solutions today. Even if you could name seasons, I don’t think it’d solve all my issues.

How have you guys solved these issues?

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Short answer to 1 & 3 is that you can’t. Movies belong in movie libraries and TV Shows in TV libraries and they don’t mix. This is the way of plex, no point in complaining, it won’t change. Also remember, plex pulls all it’s metadata from online sources (imdb, tmdb or tvdb), they don’t maintain metadata themselves. Long answer is some type of custom collection might work so maybe others can give some advice on that.

Regarding question 2 again you can’t. However, when you start watching stuff plex will put it into your continue watching hub/row. This updates to the next episode in the series based on date aired. So if the next episode is a special then the special will be presented as the next one to watch.

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Movies + Shows

Absolute Series Scanner and HamaTV solve the Movies + Shows issue by doing multiple DB lookups and allowing you to tag the folder with the correct ID; although, then I’m not using the Plex scanner.

Also, movies oddly show up as 1-episode series. Most posters don’t work correctly using this method either.

Disc-only Specials

Since my specials came out on disc only, their aired date is not aligned with episodes. Also, none of the databases, including TVDB, seem to have the correct watch order for many series. I just bought 10 series on disc these last few weeks, and none of them have the right watch order on TVDB.

I actually haven’t seen watch order correct in any DB yet. I’d rather Plex let me customize this myself. I’m sure there’s a way by modifying access to the SQLite DB.

One Example

One example is One Punch Man. On TVDB, the Season 1 specials (which should be between episodes) are all in the “Additional Specials” section whereas Season 2’s specials are after Season 2. And since it’s locked, I can’t fix it.

Even the descriptions on TVDB say “after episode 4”, but now I have to go through each special and figure out when to watch it and keep my phone handy with a watchlist. What a hassle!

Not only is this inconsistent, but it’s wrong. If you watched them in this order, you’d be completely confused.

And when I click “Play” on a show, it starts with specials and them moves onto Episode 1 after they’ve all completed. It’s wacko not to mention some specials are specific to Season 1 and some are specific to Season 2.

“Continue Watching” Issue

I don’t like the “Continue Watching” solution because I’m 100% certain it doesn’t work correctly. If TVDB doesn’t have the correct order, then how will Plex know?

Also, I like it visual because if I finish episode 6, I’m gonna come back tomorrow and click episode 7. I won’t click 6, scan to the end of the show, and let it auto-play special 2.

That’s why I’d like to fix this myself.

If I can code a scanner or agent to fix this, I will do so. It’s that big of an issue for me. I’m not big on Python, but Absolute Series Scanner and HamaTV provide a great start. Is it possible to fix these things using those tools?

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I’m just not seeing this issue myself. I have many anime, and Plex has no problem weaving in specials where they are supposed to be. If the aired-date tag is filled, Plex interweaves mid-season specials from the “Specials” season between my normal episodes.

I used Plex-for-Windows for the following:

  • I tested it just now, marked One Punch Man as “Unwatched” (more on this later). I started at the show level and clicked “Play”. Despite me having 13 Special episodes, it began playing S1E1, which aired on the 15th of Oct. Jumping to the end, I proceeded past it to episodes 2, then 3, then 4, etc etc.
  • After episode 9 (aired Nov 30th), Episode 10 aired Dec 7. However, since S0E1 (Road to Hero) aired on Dec 4th, it started playing. I quickly backed out before more than a second played. Here at the “Show” level, the “On Deck” says the next episode is S0-E1, which is what I saw. If I back out to the Home screen, my overall “Continue Watching” lists One-Punch Man Episode S0-E1 “Road to Hero” is next.
  • Interestingly, it didn’t show up on my “Continue Watching” in the anime LIBRARY’s Recommended panel for several minutes. I clicked back and forth among the UI, even closed the app entirely, and it never showed up. As I am typing this sentence, however, it finally appeared. odd.
  • I get to the end of S0E1 and the next episode that plays for me is S1E10, as expected. Looking at S0E2 (special 2), that wasn’t aired until Dec 24, so I don’t expect to see that episode until after I complete Season 1.

If you feel the air date of these specials are wrong, well, they are just that: “Aired dates”. Plex doesn’t appear to accept any episode ordering on a library-wide basis other than TVDB/TMDB “Aired Date”, of which TMDB is default.

On a Show-basis, you can use a couple more options for episode ordering if you use TVDB, which allows for “DVD order” and “Absolute” (no seasons) order, but I find that not a lot of shows support those last few options, so I don’t like using them. This leaves us with “Aired Date” as pretty much the only viable option for episode ordering.

We are in luck, though, as I believe that Plex will RESPECT the aired date of a show after you change it. So if you believe that “Road to Hero” (S00E01) should air after S01E04, then you ought to just change the “Originally Available” date for “Road to Hero” to land between E4 and E5’s dates, which are… 10/26 and 11/2. Picking a date between them should let Plex automatically handle the episode ordering when you get to it:

aired
aired901×555 167 KB

Postscript:
Remember back before, when I mentioned that I marked the show as “Unwatched”? I said so, because I think that Plex fails to handle episode ordering if you have all episodes as marked. Thinking you just want to rewatch particular episodes, I think Plex gives up on episode ordering based on air date and simple does it the old way, which is S00E01 to the end, then S01E01 all the way to the end, etc.

I haven’t really tested this fully, to make sure this is the case, but a member of my family who rewatches a show all the time complained that the specials aired first before S01E01. Near as I could tell, they were not marking the show as “unwatched”, so Plex failed to do ordering. Is this what you are doing?

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No doubt its a hassle but what do you expect plex to do ? Plex does not maintain metadata, they get it ALL from online sources as I stated. So the metadata for any episode can only be as good as the data that exists for it and also HOW those sources have decided to order the episodes. This is why I typically check episode ordering BEFORE adding any new series to my server.

I have this series (along with 40 other anime series) and specials always play when they should when played from continue watching hub/row. I have heard some folks say that auto play does not work with specials however as I don’t use auto play I cannot speak to that.

Exactly. If TVDB or TMDB are different to what you expect then again, nothing plex can do about it. They don’t own or manage metadata. The online sources have different rules as to what they decide is the running order of series so while you might believe its wrong it might be within their own rules and correct for them!

Final note. As someone with a fairly large media collection (4,000 movies, 875 series with 35k episode and 110k music tracks) who has been using plex for more years than I can remember, I’ve learned one rule. Match my media naming to my online source of choice, and for video media this is tmdb. Trying to force the square block that is plex into a round hole only leads to frustration.

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Thanks for doing all that testing and giving me a thorough response!

Playback issues

I had all the specials set to “Watched”, but the series was “Unwatched”. Not sure why it started playing the Specials first.

Aired Date

If changing the aired date works, that’s one possible fix. I’d like to program a Plex server plugin to visually slot the special between episodes just like Jellyfin does (only learned it does this last night). Any idea where to start?

I want it visual, not hidden away behind auto-play as I won’t know I’m not supposed to click “episode 7” when wanting to play the next episode in the season. I won’t always click “play” on the series itself because I might forget.

TVDB ordering issues

Correct, TVDB DVD ordering doesn’t work correctly because it’s often lacking specials completely.

Surprisingly, Specials for anime don’t ever air, they typically only appear on disc; not even on streaming.

Absolute ordering seems to be restricted to 1 season and also has the same issue of not all episodes appearing.

Aired date might need to be manually changed for each one of these season-specific specials (Road to Hero is supposed to be watched after Season 1) because they released on disc, never on air. That means they’ll always come up after the season is over, not between episodes.

One Punch Man is supposed to play in this order for Season 1:

  1. s01e01 - The Strongest Man
  2. s01e02 - The Lone Cyborg
  3. s00e02 - The Pupil Who Is An Extremely Poor Talker
  4. s00e01 - A Shadow That Snuck Up Too Close
  5. s01e03 - The Obsessive Scientist
  6. s01e04 - The Modern Ninja
  7. s01e05 - The Ultimate Master
  8. s00e03 - The Ninja Who Is Too Complicated
  9. s01e06 - The Terrifying City
  10. s01e07 - The Ultimate Disciple
  11. s00e04 - Bang, Who Is Too Overbearing
  12. s01e08 - The Deep Sea King
  13. s01e09 - Unyielding Justice
  14. s00e05 - The Sisters Who Have Too Many Things Happening
  15. s01e10 - Unparalleled Peril
  16. s01e11 - The Dominator of the Universe
  17. s01e12 - The Strongest Hero
  18. s00e06 - The Murder Case That Is Too Impossible

I can confirm this because even the TVDB descriptions say “sometime before Episode 4…”. When watching the specials after Season 1, they don’t have the same impact because I have no context where the story’s at when they take place.

Ideally, they’d play in the order I showed above because that gives you the full-context, and the slot in perfectly. In fact, there’s a joke in one of the episodes that only makes sense if you watched the OVA right before it.

I have this issue with at least 6 other shows; potentially more. That’s just the small number I’ve counted thus far, and I keep buying more.

Also affects shows + movies

If you count situations where I put movies in collections with shows (possible with Absolute Series Scanner), it’s well over 50% of my library that runs into issues because TVDB doesn’t place them correctly.

An example is Re:Zero. TVDB puts “The Frozen Bond” (a movie) before season 1 starts. That makes sense chronologically, but it’s supposed to be watched after finishing season 1 as it gives away too much the story before you even begin.

Also for Re:Zero, TVDB has Memory Snow after Season 1 when it’s supposed to be watched after episode 6 when you don’t have as good of a grasp on the future of these characters.

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I responded to some of your comments already, but I want to say that I would like the ability to customize my watch order. I know that Plex sources from databases, but it’d be great if I could click “Custom” when I don’t trust the database. From what I’ve seen, none of my shows seem to be playing in the correct order.

I get that for season 1, all of season 1 is in the correct order, but OVAs and movies are not. That’s the problem. I’d like to set that ordering up myself in Plex like I how I can drag 'n drop movies into whatever order I want in collections.

I already named everything correctly according to Plex guidelines :+1:. Plex shouldn’t care that something’s marked as “Special”. It should let me physically drag that episode where I want it to go and retain metadata.

Do you know how I can code a plugin to do this or if the SQLite database has fields for it? Is this an Agent or a Scanner thing? I can solve this problem, I just need to know where to start; then I have to learn Python.

In my opinion, Plex is wrong in how it handles shows. It’s great for movies, but now that I’ve bought a bunch of anime shows, I find that I’m not able to watch episodes in their intended order without manually looking at a watch-order.txt file for each series.

It should be up to me how episodes are ordered, not TVDB nor TMDB. I shouldn’t need to create an online database either. It should be as simple as dragging and dropping in the Plex UI, but if that’s not possible, I’d rather create an episode-order.ini file that allows me to order episodes and specials and movies however I want into whatever named season I want.

I’m willing to write this as a Plex plugin if I knew where to start. I need something to get me going; then I’ll gradually figure it out.

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FYI… https://support.plex.tv/articles/201053748-overview

Plex are removing (albeit slowly) all support for plugins.

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Well then they sure as heck better fix the way they allow customizing media because their current offering doesn’t satisfy my needs.

At this point, I’m thinking of moving to Jellyfin. I’m a PlexPass user, but it seems like a bad deal if they’re going to start restricting customization when the offered configurations aren’t sufficient.

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I suspect at some point the vast majority of us who love and maintain personal media libraries will end up there. Today, plex is still my choice but I’ve setup things that if I need to move to an alternative I can pretty much do it overnight without any major drama.

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If there was an easy way to copy over all my custom posters, backgrounds, ratings (sometimes I set old “Not Rating” movies to G for my kids), then it’d be easy for me to switch.

Right now, that’s pretty difficult and makes moving everything to Jellyfin nearly impossible. I’d also have to configure a ton of custom movie collections. Not ideal right now.

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I’ve kinda done this already via local media assets (see https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220677-local-media-assets-movies and https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220717-local-media-assets-tv-shows for details). I discovered years ago that manually setting custom artwork in plex is problematic at best so took the time to move away from it!

Anyhow, every movie has a poster and fanart, every show as a top level show poster, season specific posters and fanart and every artist and album has their own artwork along side the media. Using local assets is a game changer for artwork. Sure look at the mess plex is in today with blank posters all over the place and legal requests to remove certain posters. Won’t effect me as its all local :slight_smile:

For ratings, I’ve added pretty much everything I can to tmdb for Ireland (my location) so certifications will be correct, well as correct as I can make them without doing manual plex edits which I avoid unless there is no other choice.

Anyhow, good luck with what you decide, I wish you well.

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Failed Jellyfin Expedition

I spent the last day trying to get Jellyfin to work for me, and there are numerous issues preventing that from happening at the moment. I’ll say it does solve some problems, but not all. I don’t wanna make this a “why not Jellyfin” thread though.

Jellyfin does support specials between episodes. Great! :+1:

On the other hand, there’s no way to split seasons which is still something I wanna figure out by writing my own plugin. Crunchyroll recently added this feature which is how Gintama Season 1 is split into 4 parts.

Other needs

I just got the Japanese discs for Neon Genesis Evangelion in the mail, and it splits the season into OA (aired) and DC (director’s cut) for episodes 21-26. Both have different endings and lead-ups to the following movies, so it’s important to be able to choose with path I want to take in Plex.

Shows don’t have a concept of {edition-X}, so creating another named season that splits episodes 21-26 into 2 parts would be one solution to the problem.

Plex Plugins

Even if Plex is going to eventually remove plugins, I’m going to use them for now. I think manual installation, while crappy, is better than nothing.

If they ever remove plugin support in the future, I could always run code to modify their SQLite database directly. There are lots of ways to make this work and all of them are total hacks.

Do you know where I can start to create my own plugin that allows mapping TVDB or aniDB to whatever configuration I choose in some INI or XML file?

Another idea

Or is there a different way to do this?

What if I had a .nfo file? Are those a thing in Plex? I was wondering if I could store metadata in the file itself. If I build in metadata into the files, I can automate keeping it up-to-date with some script. If each file has its own metadata, then I can organize them however I want in whatever order I want. It would solve all my problems and not lock me into special Plex plugins.

But… Maintaining Plex metadata myself outside of Plex and somehow inserting that into each file is probably a pain in the butt.

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