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I recently purchased the Blu-ray for the first season of Pokemon, and I’m interested in adding it to Plex. The international episode ordering is quite different from the original, as several episodes were removed from the dub. TheTVDB lists the available orderings as “Aired”, “DVD”, “Absolute”, and “International” (from the API the last one is “Regional”).
In Plex, the “Episode Ordering” option in the series’ Advanced Settings only contains “Aired”, “DVD”, and “Absolute”. None of these are even remotely valid for the dub release, and so my episodes are incorrectly titled.
Is there a solution to this? How do I use the alternate ordering in Plex?
Sorry if this is a dupe - I did search for a bit but I didn’t come across anything that quite fit.
There’s probably not a lot you can do. There is a feature suggestion asking for alternate orders here
The only thing I can suggest is to look at TMDB and see if they have an order that more closely resembles what you’re looking for. You can change that under the advanced tab for the show by clicking the pencil on the poster
Unfortunately TMDB only has the Japanese order as well. It’s really unfortunate that it’s not supported by now. That feature request is three years old with no evidence of any action being taken…
I’m not sure if I’m ever going to be able to use this show, since Plex is the only way I watch content I buy physical media for.
The only other thing i can think of is to look in the specials for the show. Often times “alternate orders” on a DVD have certain episodes that fall inside a specials season.
Despite being in a different folder the episodes should populate your continue watching in the order in which they were intended to be viewed with the rest of the regular season 1
The problem isn’t that there are extra episodes that should be in specials; the problem is that the international release removed several episodes entirely (the episodes are banned outside of Japan). The order of episodes is the same, but after episode 17 the list becomes wrong because of the removed episodes.
Is there a way to disable the metadata agent for a specific show so that I can just use manual episode ordering and naming for this series?
Enable these items in the advanced settings and alter your files and artwork to match
Use local assets: When scanning this library, use local posters and artwork if present. (Local subtitles files will be used whether this is enabled or not)
Prefer local metadata: When scanning this library, prefer embedded tags and local files if present.
Is there a solution that doesn’t require me to alter the entire library? I was aware of the “prefer local metadata” option, but I want to continue using TVDB data for all of the other shows in the library.
Yes and no. And sort of. LOL. There are options but none are perfect.
Have you tried the movie db? Sometimes the moviedb will have a different order and you can select it from the show edit menu.
And if that doesn’t work you can try what I have done is you unmatch the show and you manually enter everything and hit the lock button. I have some old riverdance videos that I turned into a tv show these don’t get matched so the only way to make plex do what I want was to unmatch them and use the lock. But if you ever lose your metadata you will have to do it all over again so I recommend keeping a text file in the folder with all the info so you just have to copy and paste back.
To unmatch a show you just go to the show, click on the three dots on the bottom right and click unmatch. That disables and unmatches the show from the data agent.
I suppose I could just rename all the files to have the correct Japanese episode numbers and accept that there will be gaps. That’s probably the method that will require the least work. I don’t think this would work as a universal solution, but since I’m only dealing with “missing” episodes and not reordered episodes, it should work for me. Still not ideal, and I hope Plex implements the ability to use alternate orders later.
I’m replying here so that you know I did read your solution, and it’s a reasonable one, but I just don’t want to go through and manually edit the metadata for 46 episodes. Thank you, though!
Yeah that is a lot. I assumed it was only a handful. I ran into the same issue with some other TV show that had like 6 episodes that were banned/removed after airing. For those I simply created Special Episodes.
For example if a show has Special Episode S00E24. What I did was created S00E100. And then populated it with my info. That way the episode was still there in my library and just in case the TVDB ever got updated it wouldn’t trigger a metadata change.
Make sense? I also do this when I have a DVD that has extras for TV shows. I make the DVD extras special episodes but I put them outside the range of the TVDB.
In your case I looked at the specials for Pokemon you could use anything over S00E100 and those lost episodes would show up in Plex under specials. You would just have to add your own metadata by hand cause it wouldn’t match to anything.
Another issue is that many episodes are showing up in the uncategorized section on TVDB. So maybe eventually someone will get to editing and get those episodes into the llist.
