Inconsistent handling of multi-episode files (kid shows)

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

My programs are named according to the file conventions here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220687-naming-series-season-based-tv-shows/ despite that, the library is only showing the first episode of most double episode files. These are typically with kid’s shows (Doc McStuffins, PJ Masks) though oddly enough, in a couple cases Plex has recognized the multiple episodes for a couple files, and displays both in the library, but others (even in the same season) only show the first episode.

Here’s a couple examples:

Corresponding files:

And another series (seasons are turned off, jump from ep36 to ep19 is from Season 1 to 2):

Files:

I’ve tried multiple naming schemes like removing dashes, removing quality info, changing the episode name separator (-,+,&, and removing titles entirely) and have done the Plex Dance after every renaming attempt, but still can’t achieve any consistency with Plex’s detection. Any ideas? I’ve attached recent logs as well.

1 Like
2

Look up the show on the TVDB and see how it’s listed there. I have this issue with a bunch of combined episodes across several series and it all flows back to what the TVDB says… They normally don’t combine episodes, so you’re stuck with the data it kicks back.

Another way to look at it… it won’t pull in two different entries for a single file, no matter how you name it.

3

TVDB displays all 11 minute segments for kid’s shows as individual episodes (a stupid way to do it IMO, as they’re always aired together as a 22 minute episode, but nothing will change the minds of the neckbeards over at TVDB)

I’m not sure if you had a detailed look at the pictured examples, but as you can see in the first one (PJ Masks):

The file

PJ Masks - S02E01-E02 - Moonfizzle Balls + Soccer Ninjalinos (WEBDL-720p).mp4
is shown in the Plex library as just:
Episode 1 Moonfizzle Balls
While
PJ Masks - S02E03-E04 - Lionel-Saurus + Catboy’s Cuddly (WEBDL-720p).mp4
is shown split in the Plex Library as two different episodes:
Episode 3 Lionel-Saurus
Episode 4 Catboy’s Cuddly

So that alone doesn’t quite line up with what you’re saying.

4

Every one of your files is an mp4 file.

Plex is very likely coming to the rescue with their default location of Local Media Assets to make your life a living HELL!

Also your files ain’t named right.
(WEBDL-720p) should be [WEBDL-720p] or omitted all together. Plex will ignore everything in a [Bracket]. (YEAR) Fields are placed after the show name. Looks like Plex is already confused - no need to carry it all the way to the booby-hatch.

You may as well make up your mind to name things the way TVDB does - 'cause this is a fight you simply can’t win. If it were me - I’d place the first episode of this two-part nightmare in the making and skip the next one - making sure the first one is the one TVDB expects to see. If there’s any editing to do to the description - do it, if it makes you feel better, or if it matters to your 4 year old.

Plex is going to mishandle every single one of those two-parters - playing the first one and the second one then insisting you need to watch the second one, when you just watched it. Oh, yea, it’ll be real sweet. Your 4 year old might not even notice - or you may be in for much more fun that you ever dreamed.

Yea… drop the E01-E02 nonsense and just go with:
blabla - S01E01 - blabla
blabla - S01E03 - blabla
and call it a day.

The ONLY real positive thing S01E01-E02 does is grab the correct info from TVDB for those two episodes and make it appear there are two episodes there to watch (when there is only one). From that point Plex baubles the melon every single time and trust me (and thousands of others) it just ain’t worth it.

Regarding your mp4 files… they probably have embedded and very bogus Title Fields the friendly folks at Plex are reading and reacting badly to. Filebot could handle the naming and structuring of said files, but what FileBot can’t do is remove embedded metadata in the Title Field of MP4/M4V files. Plex will read this info and prefer it over a perfect file name/structure, but you can combat that situation by moving Local Media Assets to the bottom of every agent list you can find. All tabs in TV Shows and Movies here:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200241558-Agents
Just drag LMA to the bottom of the list and drop it. If you do have embedded metadata this will cure the issue, if you don’t it won’t matter. LMA will do what it has to from the bottom.

After you do any or all of this - if you ever want Plex to know you’ve done something or want to write a new bundle the next thing you’d better do is The Plex Dance® and you’d better do it with the entire show - not just a few episodes here and there.

Renaming/restructuring is best performed OUTSIDE the library and you may need to write a new bundle for the show or movie so The Plex Dance® was invented:

The Plex Dance®:

  1. remove show/movie from library
  2. rescan library files
  3. empty trash
  4. clean bundles
    https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200392106-Library-Actions <— scan library files, empty trash, clean bundles
  5. bring names and structures into compliance/Move LMA/etc
  6. replace corrected show/movie into library
  7. rescan library files

All Steps. In Order. No Shortcuts.

Still No Joy?

Log Files:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250417-plex-media-server-log-files/

1 Like
5

Thanks for your reply, I tried to be as thorough as possible in my initial post to avoid having to go through this piece by piece, and you’ve probably got your form reply setup for everyone else that sucks at naming/managing their media, but we’ll go through it.

@JuiceWSA said:
Every one of your files is an mp4 file.
I’m confused as to the relevance of this?

Also your files ain’t named right.
(WEBDL-720p) should be [WEBDL-720p] or omitted all together. Plex will ignore everything in a [Bracket]. (YEAR) Fields are placed after the show name. Looks like Plex is already confused - no need to carry it all the way to the booby-hatch.

It’s never been an issue before for any other movie or series, but despite that, It didn’t seem to make a difference in the second example, where that (WEBDL-720p) was absent in the first place. Also according to the naming guide everything after the dash following sXXeXX is considered ‘optional_info’ (i.e. episode title) by Plex and is ignored, so the type of braces/brackets surrounding the quality shouldn’t make a difference anyways.

In the case of Sheriff Callie season 1, this second dash was absent to begin with and Plex properly split the episodes in the library; I tried omitting that second dash for the second season as well to match, but it didn’t make a difference, Plex is still only detecting the first segment in the case of Season 2.

You may as well make up your mind to name things the way TVDB does - 'cause this is a fight you simply can’t win. If it were me - I’d place the first episode of this two-part nightmare in the making and skip the next one - making sure the first one is the one TVDB expects to see. If there’s any editing to do to the description - do it, if it makes you feel better, or if it matters to your 4 year old.

Are you familiar with Sonarr? It pulls all it’s information from the TVDB, so that part is done.

Plex is going to mishandle every single one of those two-parters - playing the first one and the second one then insisting you need to watch the second one, when you just watched it. Oh, yea, it’ll be real sweet. Your 4 year old might not even notice - or you may be in for much more fun that you ever dreamed.

Yea… drop the E01-E02 nonsense and just go with:
blabla - S01E01 - blabla
blabla - S01E03 - blabla
and call it a day.

So is it supported or isn’t it? https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220687-naming-series-season-based-tv-shows/ under the ‘Multi-Episode Files’ heading states explicitly that it will support multiple entries for properly named files, and indeed many episodes are working in that manner; the issue lies with the fact that some files show multiple episodes while others don’t, despite having the same naming convention. i.e. the inconsistent detection.

Regarding your mp4 files… they probably have embedded and very bogus Title Fields the friendly folks at Plex are reading and reacting badly to. Filebot could handle the naming and structuring of said files, but what FileBot can’t do is remove embedded metadata in the Title Field of MP4/M4V files. Plex will read this info and prefer it over a perfect file name/structure, but you can combat that situation by moving Local Media Assets to the bottom of every agent list you can find. All tabs in TV Shows and Movies here:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200241558-Agents
Just drag LMA to the bottom of the list and drop it. If you do have embedded metadata this will cure the issue, if you don’t it won’t matter. LMA will do what it has to from the bottom.

LMA has never been enabled and is at the bottom for every library in question (though if it’s deselected it’s placement in the list doesn’t matter). I’ve also reviewed the metadata for each file and there are no embedded titles or any other information of that nature.

After you do any or all of this - if you ever want Plex to know you’ve done something or want to write a new bundle the next thing you’d better do is The Plex Dance® and you’d better do it with the entire show - not just a few episodes here and there…

This was done, multiple times, as mentioned at the bottom of my initial post.

Log Files:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250417-plex-media-server-log-files/

Already attached at the bottom of the first post.

baubles the melon

wat

1 Like
6

Out of curiosity, I installed Emby (which just so happens to pull it’s data from TVDB as well), pointed it at my folder, and holy crap, wouldn’t you know it, multiple episode files are handled in an elegant way that doesn’t necessitate a laborious process of manually editing descriptions, or even worse, manually splitting video files to comply with Plex’s shortcomings!

qm3kb9kablrh.png447×583 331 KB

(remaining episodes are outside the frame)

Here’s the same library in Plex again for comparison:

So, this is starting to look like less of a ‘me’ problem and more of a ‘Plex’ problem with how it handles these sorts of multi-episode files, sounds like something that could be added to the pipeline for a future update perhaps? Unless anyone else has some input of course.

1 Like
7

Not going to argue with ya about poor file names and the reason they work sometimes and not others.

Plex works the way it works, sometimes poorly - as in this case - and you can work the work-around or you can use something else or suffer the mishandling. Absolutely up to you.

Best of luck to ya.

8

Not sure what you’re getting at with ‘poor file names’ since they’re clearly named according to the established naming conventions. I don’t feel like you actually read my first post prior to replying then basically ignored my clarifications, and when questioned your response is essentially “you’re doing it wrong, deal with it”, which is not particularly helpful.

So with that in mind, does anyone else have any input that might shed some light, perhaps a Dev or Ninja that can clarify whether this is expected behaviour, etc Cheers!

9

@evilmanimani said:
Here’s the same library in Plex again for comparison:

So, this is starting to look like less of a ‘me’ problem and more of a ‘Plex’ problem with how it handles these sorts of multi-episode files, sounds like something that could be added to the pipeline for a future update perhaps? Unless anyone else has some input of course.

I think you’re seeing some trickery happening with this example. I bet if you check the actual files that Plex is attempting to tie to (Get Info in the lower right dropdown of each of these thumbnails), then you’d discover one of them is off. There are 12 total episodes, so they should pair off to 6, which your count at the top accurately represents… The numbers under the titles of your episodes should also correspond, yet they don’t indicating a likely mismatch in one of these, perhaps more.

@JuiceWSA, while not always the most tactful, is also probably the leading expert around here in file naming standards as they apply to Plex. Ninjas often defer to him in such matters. If you take the sass out of his post, he’s got several good points.

These were hard lessons for me to learn, and they took a long time for me to wrap my head around. I had this very same issue with The Bible. TVDB claims less episodes than there are, as they aired 2 episodes back to back each night. I manually edited the whole series to make it look right. I believe I had the same issue with shows with larger episode counts, so I just edited the file name to pull the first episode and I live with it.

You truly will get the best results with a “ShowName - S00E00 - Show Title.mp4” format. Exactly as it appears in the TVDB. Not sure how Emby is pulling its data. Maybe a user somewhere made some changes and contributed them to an exception database somewhere? Maybe it actually is smarter about combining episodes? In order for it to work in Plex, it has to be entered into the TVDB in that way. Otherwise, you go manual.

MP4s matter, because they could possibly have some metadata inside the file itself that you can’t change that Plex may favor over what gets pulled from external sources… in case that wasn’t explained.

10

I looked into the Plex information about handling multi episodes, and you may have a point there, but I still don’t think it will solve your problem the way you want it to, even if it did work. Further down it states that it just makes two entries for the full file. So, if you play either one, you get the same results.

Personally, I’ve never had that actually work, but if it did, I wouldn’t call that ideal either.

11

Hey, thanks for the reply, I can understand @JuiceWSA may be the leading expert around here, but the post came off as a bit condescending, though I appreciate the response. I totally understand that Plex’s handling is basically a bit messed up, as evidenced that the same naming format combines some episodes and not others.

Guess rather than a fix I’m looking for some acknowledgment from the devs that this is actually a bug, since the behavior is inconsistent with Plex’s own support pages; and the workaround (manually renaming Titles or splitting files) is a PITA compared to the way Emby handles it. I’m not going to go to Emby since I’ve got a lifetime Plex pass, and Plex is the more mature product by far, but things don’t tend to get fixed until someone brings it up.

Cheers.

12

@JuiceWSA is one of my favorite people around here. If you read any of his other posts, you’d quickly realize that he’s not targeting you. His crass is truly equal opportunity. It’s funny if you don’t take it personally.

We can wait for a Ninja or Employee, but I’m pretty sure they’ll say it’s not a bug. It is indeed doing what it was designed to do, which is take a best guess based on your file name as to what TVDB entry to tie it to. It’s only ever going to be as accurate as the information it’s trying to take in. It is absolutely not smart about what it does.

If you use FileBot (which I think works in much the same way) for any length of time, you might start to understand the lack of science employed. I highly recommend it, as it renames files in bulk and spits out things Plex likes fairly routinely. I learn more and more about using it every day. It’s indispensable for me.

You might have something in the support documentation for multi-episodes, as my experience also differs from what they present. I also feel your pain for addressing things manually. I recently had a very large show that was so badly whacked in its original file names that it required some individual tinkering. Took me two days after work to finish it.

I’ve never invoked names before, and I’m not sure if I’m breaking etiquette, but perhaps @OttoKerner or @cayers could provide some wisdom…

13

I’m no expert. I just know how to name and structure files initially so they create the least pain and suffering (work like I want them to). I use FileBot, but even then, sometimes it takes a bit of coaxing to thwart Plex’s never ending attempts to inject pain and suffering into something that was once so easy - use the name TVDB uses <---- well those were the good old days - these are the new, not so good old days:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/254362/tv-series-name-matching-research
(Plex dreams up pain and suffering in order to make Plex DVR work and borks TVDB for the vast majority in the process… read all about it)
…meanwhile - back at the ranch…

Injecting the year field (I do that automatically with FileBot) and leaving out the episode names (I just didn’t feel like it) I created some test files:

765×590 162 KB

As expected (hoped more like it - when dealing with Plex you just hope it’s gonna work the way you want it to), and with a fresh load of these shows (Plex has never seen them before) and with what I thought might be what Plex expects to see - I got the intended (hoped for) result:

Note:

The ONLY reason to use this ‘conjoined twins naming nightmare’ is so that Plex will get the info for both the episodes from TVDB. Having done that (if it works) Plex is going to mishandle the bejebus out of these episodes in a way that will make you crazy - or at least make you have to jump through hoops every time you (well, your offspring) watch them.

Plex will dutifully play both episodes - it really can’t do anything else, can it?
Then Plex will want you to watch the second episode - that you just watched.
Your 4 year old might not mind - or there could be trouble brewing on the home front. I don’t know which.
You (or your 4 year old) will have to manually mark the second episode as watched - even though you just watched it.

Yep - that’s why most of us just skip the second episode and hand edit it’s info into the first episode if it’s annoying us.

Again - for accuracy - Here’s The Plex Dance® - 'cause if you leave out some steps you may as well not even do it:

The Plex Dance®:

  1. remove show/movie from library
  2. rescan library files
  3. empty trash
  4. clean bundles
    https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200392106-Library-Actions <— scan library files, empty trash, clean bundles
  5. bring names and structures into compliance/Move LMA/etc
  6. replace corrected show/movie into library
  7. rescan library files

All Steps. In Order. No Shortcuts.

Forgive my attitude - I’ve been working on it for well over 60 years and have it just about the way I want it…

B)

BTW - you shouldn’t disable LMA… you might need it for something (subtitles, local artwork, etc), but it can do what it has to from the bottom of the list and not cause undue amounts of pain and suffering that it surely will from the top.

1194×437 161 KB

TMDB looks the same - but TMDB is in the lead with TVDB running a close second.

14

@JuiceWSA said:
Forgive my attitude - I’ve been working on it for well over 60 years and have it just about the way I want

Do not change a thing sir. You rock, and in spite of what you say, you really are good at this stuff.

15

@AmazingRando24 said:
You rock, and in spite of what you say, you really are good at this stuff.

I can make Plex work, come up with or use a previously invented work-around (like The Plex Dance) to my advantage - and sometimes the advantage of others that understand sarcasm or plain old grumpiness.

Think of me as the Discount @OttoKerner - if I don’t know how something works he does and I might have one of his posts bookmarked. I’m also quick to rage on Plex (at the drop of a hat), 'cause sometimes what they do is just stoopit. Otto wouldn’t do that.

B)

16

I’m having this same issue with Paw Patrol. I know it’s kids crap and as long it shuffles it doesn’t matter but it bothers me too. If I want to play them a Halloween or Christmas special I’m hosed.

Experimenting with file naming tonight.