Multi-episode handling / Enabling Scene Formatting

Feature Suggestions
1

Continuing the discussion from Multi-Episode Handling:

Than I guess my suggestion does differ from the other post you referenced. Supporting scene formatting in addition to, or in lieu of, range formatting seems like a better solution, given that I have already shown a clear-cut example (Rugrats) where the files one can obtain in the wild differ in episode order from the order plex uses. Range formatting doesn’t allow for missing episodes in a multi-episode file. Scene formatting does. I have never seen an in the wild example of a series that mushes together more than a few episodes into one file… They may exist, but they would necessarily be very rare.

2

I’m not sure I understand what exactly you’re asking for. Based on the original suggestion you asked for an option to display a single item in Plex per file if a file contains different episodes.

That’s already covered/discussed in another suggestion.
Please help me understand what gap you see towards this suggestion and what you mean by range vs. scene naming.

3

So I had this post all typed up, and was about to hit send, and got distracted… while I was distracted, I found the setting in plex that allows you to change the episode sort order to “DVD”… which would have been really helpful had I known about it a few months ago when I was pulling my hair out over “rugrats”… I am leaving my originally typed response below, just to explain the differences between range and scene naming, but I guess the difference is largely moot if we can select different episode ordering types, as I can’t fathom any other use case where episodes would be missing from a multi-episode file.

Thanks for being patient with me. Original message follows.

Range naming works like this:

If a single file contains multiple episodes, say episodes 1, 2, and 3… the format is s01e01-e03

But what if that file contains episodes 1, 3, and 7? This actually occurs, even though it is stupid.
There is no way for range naming to account for this. s01e01-e07 would tell plex that there are 7 episodes in that file.

Scene naming, on the other hand, works like this:

If a single file contains multiple episodes, say episodes 1, 2, and 3… the format is s01e01-e02-e03

But what if that file contains episodes 1, 3, and 7?
Then the format would simply be s01e01-e03-e07

Obviously, in either case, the number of situations where having more than 2 episodes per file is pretty small. It is even more rare to have multiple “out of order” episodes…

The bigger issue is definitely that Plex cannot handle even two episodes, no matter the naming style, but when those rare occasions do happen that a multiple episode file has files out of order compared to the order that the plex considers the “right” order, supporting scene naming is the superior method.

By the by, I did see someone mention in another thread today about a file they had with 10 episodes in one file… in that case the scene naming would be s01e01-e02-e03-e04-e05-e06-e07-e08-e09-e10 … which is unwieldy, to be sure, but not prohibitively so. This would be among the most extreme cases of situations in which range naming is functionally superior.

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P.S. feel free to close or delete this thread.

5

2023 clean-up: considered to be partly feasible (implemented), partly a duplicate