Dinotopia is, depending on how you look at it, either a TV show or two TV shows. It was first adapted as a miniseries. Then, later the same year, a sequel television series with the same creatives but a different cast aired.
TheMovieDB lists these as:
Miniseries: Dinotopia (TV Series 2002-2002) — The Movie Database (TMDB)
Follow-Up One Season Series: Dinotopia (TV Series 2002-2003) — The Movie Database (TMDB)
TheTVDB lists these as:
Miniseries: Adventures in Dinotopia - TheTVDB.com
Follow-Up One Season Series: Dinotopia - TheTVDB.com
IMDB lists these as:
Miniseries: Dinotopia (TV Mini Series 2002) - IMDb
Follow-Up One Season Series: Dinotopia (TV Series 2002–2003) - IMDb
Here’s Plex:
Miniseries: https://watch.plex.tv/show/adventures-in-dinotopia
Follow-Up One Season Series: https://watch.plex.tv/show/dinotopia-1
So you can see the first issue is that Plex follows IMDB and Streaming Services in calling the miniseries “Adventures in Dinotopia” but TMDB and TheTVDB do not call it that. It’s unclear to me that Adventures in Dinotopia is the actual name of the series, it seems to be something that got slapped on the show for streaming releases to make search results clearer.
Anyway, here’s my file structure:
Miniseries: /TV/Dinotopia (2002) {tmdb-73536}/Miniseries/
Follow-Up One Season Series: /TV/Dinotopia (2002) {tmdb-15775}/Season 1/
Initially I had both in one folder, because that’s how the metadata was treated several years ago on TheTVDB at the time, I think. But after doing some library restructuring recently, I noticed that the Miniseries episodes had de-matched. So I moved the Miniseries into a separate folder and renamed both folders accordingly. The library scan picked up the new folders, but merged them both into the same show (not sure if this is a general problem or a function of having moved the files from another folder). I selected Split Apart. Then I Fix Match on Miniseries and select the “Adventures in Dinotopia” choice (which was not obvious to me because I’d never heard that name). But although the show matched, the episodes did not. I Refresh Media on the Miniseries (or the individual episodes) and it definitely works, but the episodes still don’t match.
At first I thought the issue was that Plex did not like the “Miniseries” folder name, except that the web metadata for the Miniseries on Plex uses the season name “Miniseries” rather than “Season 1”, so it must be that Miniseries is correct.
Then I discovered the issue, and it came down to my filenames:
Dinotopia - S00E01 - Miniseries Episode 1.mkv
Plex thinks the Miniseries is season 1 of the show, even though it’s called Miniseries instead of Season 1. It won’t match files that are numbered as S00E01. Renaming to Dinotopia - S01E01 - Miniseries Episode 1.mkv fixed the problem and everything scanned in.
I’m not sure what the right answer here is because clearly this is a pretty unusual arrangement, but it seems to me like at a minimum it’s not obvious that a “Miniseries” season should be numbered S01 rather than S00 (as is normal for “Miniseries” when the miniseries is considered “Specials” of a TV series).
