Manually specify TV seasons/episodes without renaming

General Discussions
1

I’m having issues with Plex inferring totally wrong details about TV episodes. It will frequently group all episodes together into one episode, with different “versions”.

Is there any way to untangle this through the web UI or REST API? I want to manually specify which episode is which (along with titles etc).

I know I can do the “plex dance” with renaming files, but the files are used by other systems as well, so I don’t consider renaming them an option.

I’ve considered temporarily moving the files, using symlinks, scanning to get the hash in Plex, then putting the original files back, but this bug has happened with multiple TV shows and I don’t want to have to do that repeatedly (although if that’s the only way, I might look into writing a script to do it.)

Edit: For example, here’s what Plex thinks Planet Earth II is on my system: https://i.imgur.com/B5amtRH.png . There is no season 20 (only 1 season in the series), no episode 16 (only 6 episodes). Instead it puts all 6 episodes together as “alternate versions” of some episode 16 which doesn’t exist. I’ve tried matching/unmatching but can’t seem to get it to work correctly.

2

You can’t manually specify(edit) season/episodes. You can’t split/merge seasons or episodes.
What are the filenames of your series if you don’t mind me asking…

3

The first one is: Planet Earth II 2016 E01 1080p BluRay DD5.1 x264-VietHD.mkv

The rest of them follow the same format, but the episode number increases.

I assume it’s reading the season/episode from the year, which is frankly kinda silly, given that “E01” seems like a better match. Maybe it just doesn’t understand that some series only ever have one season so it’s not in the filename (most nature doc series are like this).

4

I know you said renaming them is not an option but could you rename them in a way to satisfy plex and your other system programs?
Perhaps

Planet Earth II 2016 S01E01 1080p BluRay DD5.1 x264-VietHD.mkv
Planet Earth II 2016 S01E02 1080p BluRay DD5.1 x264-VietHD.mkv
5

It’s possible. I think I can do this:

  • move them out of the directory
  • rescan (removes them)
  • move them back into the directory, name them S01E01 etc
  • rescan
  • rename them back to their original names
  • rescan

It’s a massive PITA and there’s about a dozen shows like this, but it’s certainly doable.

6

Ain’t that the truth. There are 3rd party programs that can assist you in renaming.
Total Commander comes to mind. You could rename each series(including every season) in about 5-10 seconds.
But first I would make sure those names will work before renaming whole series… Just in case…
While I don’t know what your “used by other systems” requirements are but you can also try FileBot. It have many advanced naming schemes and templates.
https://www.filebot.net/naming.html

7

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