Hi there. I’ve encountered a repeated problem with Plex’s metadata of television shows that have multiple-story episodes. This can be demonstrated with a show like Hey Arnold!, which has two stories told per broadcast episode. Take a look at the list of episodes.
Episode 1: “Downtown as Fruits” and “Eugene’s Bike”
Episode 2: “The List” and “Haunted Train”
I extracted the files from the DVD and saved them with this naming convention:
Hey Arnold! - S1E01 - Downtown as Fruits - Eugene's Bike
Hey Arnold! - S1E02 - The List - Haunted Train
But in the Plex player, the episodes are listed as this:
Episode 1: Downtown as Fruits — (actually “Downtown as Fruits” and “Eugene’s Bike”)
Episode 2: Eugene’s Bike — (actually “The List” and “Haunted Train”)
I attempted to fix the problem with this naming convention:
Hey Arnold! - S1E01-E02 - Downtown as Fruits - Eugene's Bike
Hey Arnold! - S1E03-E04 - The List - Haunted Train
And that resulted in the Plex player displaying the episodes like this:
Episode 1: Downtown as Fruits — (actually “Downtown as Fruits” and “Eugene’s Bike”)
Episode 2: Eugene’s Bike — (actually “Downtown as Fruits” and “Eugene’s Bike”, again)
Episode 3: The List — (actually “The List” and “Haunted Train”)
Episode 4: Haunted Train — (actually “The List” and “Haunted Train”, again)
So now I’ve got the problem of redundant episodes. It’s not just Hey Arnold!; this happens with every show I’ve tried that has multiple-story episodes.
Where does Plex get its metadata from? Why can’t it properly recognize that something like “Downtown as Fruits” and “Eugene’s Bike” are both episode 1?
If you want to list the show with combined episodes, you will have to either (a) manually edit the metadata in Plex, or (b) use the MP4 container (instead of MKV) and embed the metadata to the MP4 file (Plex can read metadata embedded in MP4s).
Having each episode displayed twice under two different names isn’t ideal for back-to-back streaming, so I might go the route of manually editing the metadata — or better yet, fixing the episode data over on TVDB. Good to know how this works.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know if Plex stores media metadata in a JSON or XML file or the like, and where it would be found?
I like that Plex supports multiple-episodes-in-one-file, but I wish it handled them differently. I wish it’d auto-combine them into a single entry on Plex, with the title and description combined automatically. The way it is currently, showing up as two separate entries but both play the same file, is unsatisfactory. If you don’t know that the files are combined in Plex’s back-end, and don’t know how Plex supports multi-episode files, it can be confusing to attempt to select episode 2 of a two-part file and getting angry that it appears that episode 1 plays instead.
What I end up doing, is labeling the file to indicate it is a two parter (S01E01 02 - EPISODE 1 TITLE - EPISODE 2 TITLE.mkv), but intentionally mislabeled so Plex won’t pick it up as a two-episode file. So now, the season will appear to have half as many episodes as it should, going from episode 1, then 3, then 5, etc. I will then modify the metadata of the episode, copying the title and description from TVDB into the episode 1 details. It’s an annoyingly manual process that I wish Plex’d support automatically.
It’s so annoying, that I have been toying with the idea of manually splitting each episode myself using MKVTools, but that is another manual process and can result in files with odd clips as the x264 key files might not land on the black screen between episodes.
Edit: If you rely on Plex’s “Play next automatically” feature, it will ensure that you won’t be sent from episode 1 (S01E01-E02.mkv) to episode 2 (S01E01-E02.mkv), it won’t play them twice. If implemented properly, Plex will skip the “second” entry, as it was already played in the first. But it’s not satisfying to look, and as far as the player is concerned it looks like you watched S01E01 and went straight to S01E03 if you look at the title of the episode in the corner of the video player.
