So on cartoon shows like Adventure time or Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy each 24 minute episode is two 12 minute episodes with different titles. Is there a way for plex to label each episode with both titles or will I have to do it manually?
Depends on the metadata source, but most likely the sources (TMDB and IMDB) label them as separate episodes. However, most “sources” of episodes leave them together in one file. This is most often because the only versions of the show had them together without 2 intro and 2 credits.
Thankfully, Plex handles this in a way:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/#toc-4
This link goes to the specific section in Plex’s help site that informs you how to name your file. Essentially, you want to include both episode numbers in the filename at once. So for a file that has S01E01 AND S01E02, you have the numbers of the filename of the single file would be S01E01E02 or S01E01-E02, whichever you prefer.
Plex will notice this, and create TWO entries in your library, one for each episode. However, that is only how far it goes. It will not attempt to detect where in the file the second episode starts, and selecting the second episode will simply play the entire file from the beginning. If you play the series, Plex will automatically skip the “second” library item, since playing the first item has both episodes in it already.
thanks that helps a lot. now to figure out how poorly the episode files are named and organized
Double episodes is no problem, something like S01E01-E02 works. But multipart episodes is broken. If you put the partX in the middle of the file name just after the episode number then the order will be alphabetic instead of the part-order, which there is 50% chance it is wrong, if you put the partX at the end just before the extension name then it will be ok. But the playback is broken, it will only play the first part of the episode. It is strange because multipart files for movies works correctly.
Plex recommends (and has for as long as I can remember) joining episodes spread across multiple episodes into a single file. See “Episodes Split Across Multiple Files” in this document:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/
Specifically, this note:
To get a better overall experience, we recommend that you use a tool to join/merge
the individual files into a single video. There are multiple ways you can do this
and a quick search in your favorite search engine should give you some options on
how to “join” files. An unofficial guide with one free tool has even been posted
in our forums.
I don’t think it’s relevant here, but since you brought it up…
It is EXTREMELY RARE for me to find any episode that online databases believe are one episode, but have been split into multiple files, so thankfully this doesn’t come up often. If it does, you can use MKVToolNix to easily merge them, assuming they are the same source (audio and video tracks must have been encoded using the exact same settings, I believe).
For the “- Part X” mention, it must be at the end of the file name, as Plex pretty much reads from the end of the filename and looks backwards for flags such as this. If you place this flag in the middle of the file, Plex misses it, and doesn’t merge them as you would hope for. Since the title of the episode is never pulled from the filename, you can leave that out in this case, and leave the episode titled S01E01 - Part 1.mkv and S01E01 - Part 2.mkv for example and the Plex merge should work, plus they are still arranged alphabetically in your folder structure.
Yes, it is rare but it happens. I had last week problems with the TV series Terra Nova. And it happens more with old European kids cartoons, for which you find individual “episodes” but since they were aired in block of three of them all online DBs consider those blocks as one episode.
Using partX at the end works in theory while scanning, but during playback only the first one will be played. As I said it is strange because it works correctly for movies.
I’m struggling with the original 1966 Batman (cartoon) series. They have 2 parts to each episode and the naming confuses the description of each part.
Do you mean the 1968 cartoon series “The Adventures of Batman”, or the live-action 1966 TV Show “Batman”? (I suspect the 1968 cartoon show, as I doubt the live action show had 2-parter episodes back then)
I haven’t indexed either series, but something looks to be up with the cartoon show. On TheMovieDB AND TVDB, each episode seems to alternate between 8ish minutes and 15ish minutes long. Very odd.
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