sometimes a TV Show may contain specials… Sometimes a TV Show may have multiple seasons. Sometimes those seasons may even contain similar specials each… Do you see where I’m getting at? No? Then you must not have anime in your library, “lucky you” because this one addition would go a long, LONG way to managing anime properly in Plex.
Say you have an Opening for each season of an anime and then the given Endings as well and then some other content per season, for example OVAs. (although those are a different beast)
So if you use the typical HAMA/ASS combo you may add season 1 super fine and its specials will import just fine as well, the trouble begins when all the specials of season 2 clog up the specials view that now has “dublicate entries” with the same name…
Specials per franchise as opposed to per season is bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. It has to stop. Please end this madness, Plex team!
This may not be what you’re looking for, but as a possible workaround, if you don’t mind entering your own metadata after importing:
You could use nonexistent season/episode numbering to collect the content together into logical groups…
E.g., Lets say you have a show with 5 regular seasons and each season has 10 regular episodes. And all of that correctly gets imported and matched by TVDB (or whatever your preferred meta agent is)… But you also have a bunch of special content that isn’t listed in your meta agent, or that you don’t like how the meta groups it all together in a single Specials folder…
So you could instead number the specials to appear within the individual seasons each special is related to, by giving each one a unique episode number that’s not a part of the regular season.
Like say you have a special that you want to appear alongside Season 1 content instead of in the Specials folder… Instead of naming the file “Show Name - S00E01 - Episode Name” you could name it “Show Name - S01E101 - Episode Name”… Since season 1 doesn’t have a real episode 101, there won’t be a conflict with a real episode; while the special will now appear in your Season 1 folder after all the regular Season 1 episodes.
Or if you didn’t want the Season 1 Specials in your Season 1 folder either, you could instead change the season count in the file name. E.g., “Show Name - S101E01 - Episode Name”… Since there is no real season 101 of the show, there’s no conflict with meta agent data, so you’ll be free to put all your Season 1 Specials in the season 101 folder, all your Season 2 Specials in a season 102 folder, etc.
Of course this is more work than simply assigning file names that match with the numbering scheme used by your actual meta agent, since Plex can’t scrape in meta data for episodes that don’t have a season or episode number that matches with the agent… But it’ll give you a lot of custom control over how these episodes are organized.
Not a perfect solution, but I’ve taken similar steps with some unique specials in my library, as well for handling cases where I have “collections” of animated shorts that were in a single video file, etc.
