I do see what you mean. The only way plex will mark ep02 as watched is to play the multipart episode from the beginning again(which plex will do cause it’s multipart). Two 43 minute episodes combined may come out to an 1½ show. You hit play on ep01 and 1½ later it plays again not marking both ep01&ep02 watched.
My solution to this problem is simple: I do not have two part episodes at all.
If an episode is originally numbered s01e01-e03 I just number it as s01e01 and the number the next episode as s01e04 skipping e02 and e03. If I want to have correct and complete metadata I just add it to the description while editing in Plex. But I usually do not bother and Plex does not care if episode numbers are skipped.
I know my use case is not perfect and Plex should mark an entire episode series like e01-e03 as watched when the file gets watched one time but that is not what happens so we just have to live with the way it works and adapt our desires to what actually happens.
That’s one way to do it. I did do that a long time ago but couldn’t comprehend that I’m NOT missing an episode then realizing after I downloading more copies that I already had it. The worst for me were season finales e.g. ep23 & ep24. I would think damn, I’m missing ep24. Drove me nuts. I now split all multi-episodes no matter what. good or bad/ choppy or not… Most times the splits are stellar including intros and end credits.
I’m not sure if here is already a thread for this like this in the actual feature suggestions category but am moving this there.
To bad you can’t mass PM all in this thread to let them know it’s now a vote-able topic.
Lets hope all have it in their “watching” or “tracking”… Not sure being it was created in April 2017.
Damn…how do I vote again??
Maybe if we drive a big bus round the UK offering people 350 million quid they will also vote 
Click the vote button on the top of the topic.
Voted. Just mark both episodes as watched and auto play to the next one. No need to try and figure out how the episodes split.
3 Likes
I agree just mark the episodes watched at the end and move on to the next file.
I’m watching Animaniacs which on tvdb and wiki lists each section of an episode as an episode despite the opening and credits only appearing once… splitting the files would mean splitting 70+ files and renaming the resulting 180+ files. Splitting is fine for the occasional 3 in one episode but truly annoying in a case like this.
1 Like
i agree. please mark both episodes as watched and auto play to the next one. it’s an issue with beavis and butthead and other shows.
I added one of my precious few votes to this, even though it should have been added Day 1, and the fact that is hasn’t been added yet means it probably never will be, and so I’m likely wasting my vote
But seriously, this is such an easy fix and it would significantly improve the Plex experience.
21 Votes, surely enough for the amount of effort required to implement?? NO?? OK best try and generate more interest…
off to twitter to suggest there might be free beer with every vote 
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Upboated. All aboard!
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Upvoted as well. I would say, at minimum:
- Mark both episodes as played provided that the one file was played entirely.
You could also add an option in the metadata for a HH:MM:SS entry for where to split the file. Plex has a transcoder, that should be able to start relatively close to that time. That way, if you cared, you could add that data and it would play the second half where you asked it to.
Additionally, to go all out, you could have something in the Web Player that would let you identify where Episode 2 started, and save that data when you identified that point.
This would eliminate all of the confusion of:
- thinking that the downloaded file was wrong because episode 2 was identical.
- thinking that you had missed episodes (renaming E01E02 to just E01 and skipping E02)
- having to somehow combine show information from both episodes (and in some cases, probably duplicating some of it depending upon how the shows were described).
Just my 2 cents.
2 Likes
Lord ---- actually I’d dealing with classic Doctor Who episodes now. It gets further complicated because a multi-file episode can also have a subtitle. Like this:
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Dead Planet - pt1.avi
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Survivors - pt2.avi
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Escape - p3.avi
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Ambush - pt4.avi
How do you suggest handling this? I’ve been unsuccessful so far
I use the TVDB episode guide.
So for this those episodes are season 1 episodes 5-8
so…
Doctor Who - S01E05 - The Dead Planet - pt1.avi
Doctor Who - S01E06 - The Survivors - pt2.avi
Doctor Who - S01E07 - The Escape - p3.avi
Doctor Who - S01E08 - The Ambush - pt4.avi
Stacked episodes ONLY work if the names are identical (minus the -partX). The way you have it now, Plex will assume you have 4 copies of the same episode.
So, for the examples you provided, it would be something like this…
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Dead Planet & The Survivors & The Escape & The Ambush -Part1.avi
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Dead Planet & The Survivors & The Escape & The Ambush -Part2.avi
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Dead Planet & The Survivors & The Escape & The Ambush -Part3.avi
Doctor Who - The Daleks - S01E02 - The Dead Planet & The Survivors & The Escape & The Ambush -Part4.avi
The ptX is not needed in your situation because you have the correct nomenclature.
Just for thoroughness here are my names.
Doctor Who (1963) - s01e05 - The Daleks Saga; The Dead Planet (1).mp4
Doctor Who (1963) - s01e06 - The Daleks Saga; The Survivors (2).mp4
Doctor Who (1963) - s01e07 - The Daleks Saga; The Escape (3).mp4
Doctor Who (1963) - s01e08 - The Daleks Saga; The Ambush (4).mp4
This is far and away my most needed new function. Plex handles this terribly today. My daughter has several seasons of cartoons where episodes are combined into a single file, i.e. S01E01E02. So she plays episode 1 with the feature on that continues playing future episodes in the season but then ends up watching both episode 1 and 2 twice because when episode 2 starts it just plays the whole thing again, instead of detecting there are two episodes via the filename and skipping the second play/moving on to episode 3.
I’m not going to split the files manually, in response to the obvious statement that is some kind of viable solution when this could be so easily handled by the software & is obviously a deficiency with Plex today.
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While I agree that it should be easy to fix there is an easy work around that I use to get around the deplorable way Plex does not handle multiple part files:
What I do is not name them like S01E01E02 but rather name them just S01E01 or S01E02 and completely leave off the other episode number.
Plex does not care if an episode is skipped/missing and the only problem is the metadata and that can be fixed, if desired, by a simple edit.
I have no desire to complicate things so I try always to do things the simple way and it is clear that Plex has no intent to fix this bug so I use the simplest workaround I can.
1 Like
I really have a love-hate relationship with plex.
It’s an amazing multimedia server, but they just keep pulling stunts like this.
Adding live-TV, great. Yet they had this awful way of selecting channels and no proper guide (thank god that’s fixed now)
Now this… -.-
Wonder what’s gonna be next.
