Matching a miniseries from a BD that has all episodes combined into one file?

[Joey_Jay]

After ripping the Blu-Ray for the TV miniseries SALEM’S LOT (1979) I see that this 2-part show has been combined into one file from the disc.

When I add it to Plex, I can label it as S01E01 but then it only shows the metadata for E01. I tried labelling it S01E01 E02 but that didn’t fix the issue.

Do I have to somehow split the file into 2 episodes? Or is there a way to tell Plex this is episode 1 and 2 combined into 1 file?

I tried adding it as a Movie but Plex didn’t recognize it that way at all since it’s not in the movie databases, it’s in the TV databases.

[tom80H]

If you want to keep it as one file, the correct naming should be

TV Shows  <- the folder linked to your tv-show library
  Salem's Lot (1979)
    Season 01
      Salem's Lot (1979) - s01e01-e02.ext

Alternatively you could attempt to split the original file into the actual 2 episodes.

[HowTo]: splitting multi-episode files with MKVtoolnix GUI

The purpose of this HowTo is to split videofiles which contain more than one episode of a tv show into single-episode files. So they show up individually within plex, can be played individually and don’t produce any of the weird things that multi-episode files are plagued with. The tool used is MKVtoolnixGUI it is freely available for all major PC operating systems. Therefore the container format of the output files will be MKV. The input format can be a multitude of containers like AVI, MP4…

[Joey_Jay]

Thanks for the quick response.

I modified the filename with the naming convention you suggested, but got 2 episodes pointing to the same file. So playing E01 plays the entire file, playing E02 also plays the entire file. Both episodes show a total length of both episodes combined. I realize this is probably the best that Plex can do, unless there is some way to tell Plex what time marker in an episode to start playblack?

[tom80H]

Plex doesn’t currently support that.
There’s a number of related feature suggestions discussing options like displaying 1 item per multi-episode file that displays the title/metadata of all included episodes or some means to point Plex to the individual episode start/end times within each file.

[Joey_Jay]

Yikes. Just took a look at that software for macOS. The developer won’t support it and the interface is pretty bad, so I couldn’t even figure out how to use it to do a simple split of an MKV. I’ll look around for some kind of tutorial or a better piece of software. Oops, just found your link to the tutorial. Wow, you’re good. Solving my problems before I even ask them!