Having two episode as single one with indication would be alright for me. Simply indicate episode 1-2. But some people may not be happy not having meta data for the second episode.
What if Plex separates them as two episodes but take playtime metadata to guess when the second episode starts? This way, when second episode is viewed, Plex starts from halfway instead of from the beginning. Obviously it isn’t going to be perfect since not all multi episode files are going to align with exact timeframe, but I think it will serve purpose relatively well enough.
Will this ever get sorted? I don’t see how it would be difficult to mark the following episodes in the file as watched after the ‘first’ one has been watched.
I’m hoping this gets added as a feature soon too now that PMS 1.0 is out. Almost all children cartoons are multi-episode files and it pains me to watch them try to rewatch the same episode because it shows that they didn’t play the second episode.
This really needs to get addressed. I have a lot of kids shows in my library and they are all broken up like this. It makes it more difficult on my viewers since they end up being confused on what they’ve watched and what they haven’t.
+1 for addressing this in some way, although I think there are really at least two separate problems here that depend on the type of content.
For my own personal situation, I’m dealing with a lot of TV shows from DVDs where thetvdb has them listed as separate parts because they aired separately (most shows on TV do this for syndication purposes), however the DVD release combines the two parts into a single episode. Splitting them doesn’t even make a lot of sense in this case, since often there’s no credit rolls or intros between the two parts, so they really do run more like a single episode.
For these shows, I don’t see any real advantage to having separate entries, as I’d never see a reason to watch the parts separately — they really come across just as an extended episode. Of course, I realize I can just name them with the first episode, but it does bother me to see a “missing” episode number. For my own purposes, I think the way to handle these would simply be allowing Plex to show all of the episode numbers in the UI (e.g. “Episodes 1-2”), and it wouldn’t even be unreasonable to simply concatenate the description metadata from both episodes. Artwork is trickier, but for these types of shows I don’t really see that as a big issue.
Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem for those who have DVDs with kids shows that really are distinct episodes. In my case, I’d totally go through the trouble of splitting these so that it wouldn’t be an issue, but obviously that’s more work, and I agree that it would be nice to see a way for Plex to simplify this somehow, but I don’t know if there’s a “magic bullet” solution beyond simply sharing watched status, as marking in-out times for each episode doesn’t sound like it’s that much less complicated than simply splitting the files in the first place (which is arguably a better “future proofing” solution anyway).
+1 as well, I’d love to be able to set the time of the second episode, but even just marking both as watched and moving to the next real file would be good enough.
I’ve run across this again, and though I don’t think I’d seen this thread before it’s a sorely needed feature.
The episode markers are probably superfluous for most use cases, but for Plex to know that a single file contains multiple episodes and yet fail to update the watched status of all contained episodes when the file is played is…sub-optimal.
Yes, we can manually mark things as watched to work around this. No, that’s not a fix.
If the hold-up is determining the best way to cover all possible cases, figure out which episode the user is actually in when they pause, and so on and so forth…at least tell us that?
This issue is especially annoying for cartoon shows like Animaniacs or Rocky & Bullwinkle where a single half-hour episode that never aired in parts is split into multiple “episodes” by theTVDB. I’d love it if there was just a checkbox somewhere that I could select to “compress multi-episode files” for display or something like that. Have Plex group together episodes in the interface that are all part of a single file.
It’s so frustrating that this hasn’t been addressed in any meaningful way. “You can manually fix the watched status” is the equivalent of “Go away you pesky user. We don’t want to fix this obvious usability issue”.
I just poked around in the database and the ‘media_parts’ table contains the information about multiple episode entries linked to the same physical file, it would simple to do a check for other episode index entries that point to the same physical file as the one whose resume point/watched status is being updated and update all index items simultaneously.
That way, when you finish watching the item indexed as Episode 1 from the physical file Show.S01E01-E02 then the item indexed as Episode 2 which also points to the physical file Show.S01E01-E02 would get marked as watched at the same time. This would mean the On-Deck would reflect the item indexed as Episode 3 which points to the physical file Show.S01E03 as the next episode to watch… You know, like how everyone would expect the system to behave.
If I stop watching at 24min35sec into the double episode then resuming Episode 1 or Episode 2 would take me to the 24min35sec point in the physical file Show.S01E01-E02, again, exactly as anyone would expect.
So easy to say… but after years and years of user requests so hard to get PLEX to do…
This really needs to be fixed. We shouldn’t have to manually set the watched status for episodes when the server knows damn well they’ve been watched because they’re in the same file.
I am a new user and am trying to upload TV show episodes that match all of the use cases listed in this thread. I now realize that I need to split the episodes out to individual files to make things work the way they should.
Add me to the list of frustrated users. I’ve been using Plex for years and it’s made a lot of significant advancements since I started using - I don’t understand why this hasn’t been resolved yet. Splitting episodes isn’t really viable for kids shows that have hundreds of multi-episode file.
Another lost soul pleading for this. Kids shows are the worst offenders and those users have the most problems with it (though I guess at least they probably don’t care as much as others if they watch something twice).
New user and loving Plex for the most part. It has let my family watch movies again now that we don’t have to dig in multiple bankers boxes of DVD’s to see what we have. But I would really like this options fixed even it is can be a setting to set the time of the episode break or a check box for at the Chapter break. Have that option trigger when a file name shows multiple episodes in the name. That would be great to have as stated above. Children’s shows are the worst for this on DVD’s.
Also chiming in for this. Rocky and Bullwinkle has like, 5 “episodes” per file. Trying to watch them in sequence is…painful. I don’t want to watch the same 5 short clips 5 times. I want Plex to skip to episode 6 after 1-5 were watched as part of the same physical file.
Anyone out there in Plex Developer Land…LISTEN UP!
Howitzer_1’s post summarizes what I think many of us would agree is a simple and achievable solution to this LONG STANDING flaw. But let me be even more brief:
Just mirror the watched status and resume point for every episode linked to the same file. Problem solved.
As a Lifetime Plex Pass user, I find it shocking that this thread has existed for 4+ years without official comment nor resolution. Doesn’t a single Plex developer have kids who watch Paw Patrol, PJ Masks, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood? These are all BROKEN in the current implementation.
