Hey guys,
So I started to buy and rip TV shows to plex. For example I’ve bought season 1-4 of Arrow and I’m using MakeMKV to rip them. The problem I’m having is figuring out which episode is which. The naming of the files on the discs are not in order of the episodes. For now I’ve been able to look at netflix and play a part of each episode to figure it out. Does anyone know of a website that has the episodes mapped to the names on the discs? How do you guys figure it out? Thanks!
Plex fetches its Series metadata from TheTVDB
Look it up on there and use the same episode order. Which is derived from the order of the episodes when they aired for the first time.
They also have a metadata for DVD releases, but I’d only use this to ID the actual episode number from my rip.
The MKV chat discussion has some good suggestions: https://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10381
I’m still confused about this. Below is the details of a couple episodes on one of the discs and when I went through, these are the true order. TheTVDB doesn’t have the names on the disc to episode order.
Title information
Name: Arrow Season 3 Disc 4 (English)
Source file name: 00073.mpls
Duration: 0:44:24
Chapters count: 8
Size: 6.5 GB
Segment count: 1
Segment map: 23
File name: Arrow_Season_3_Disc_4_t01.mkv Actually Episode 23
Title information
Name: Arrow Season 3 Disc 4 (English)
Source file name: 00072.mpls
Duration: 0:42:30
Chapters count: 9
Size: 6.2 GB
Segment count: 1
Segment map: 22
File name: Arrow_Season_3_Disc_4_t02.mkv Actually Episode 22
After writing this up I just noticed that for these two examples, the Segment map matches the episode number. Is that what I’m suppose to look at?? Thanks for your help!!
Yes you are correct. On the TVDB the DVD Season = your files Name field “…Season 3…” and the TVDB DVD Episode Number = your Segment Map. Ran thru all season 3 on TVDB and spot checked earlier seasons and this seems to hold true
The problem is as you have noticed that frequently the order of the episodes on a DVD when looking at the title in MakeMKV or Handbrake has nothing to do with the series order of the episodes. The solution is to play the DVD in VLC and then use the menus to play each episode and when the episode is playing note the title that is playing. Repeat for each episode on the DVD. You can then use this information to rename the tracks to the format that Plex requires which will be of the form “Arrow - s03e23.mkv”
There is unfortunately no way to automate the process as far as I am aware, and I found in doing my DVD collection even within a series different discs within a season of a boxed set can have different numbering. Though to be fair most seasons are generally consistent.
My methodology was to cut and paste from the TVDB web pages into a text editor, clean it all up into the format that Plex understands (a text editor that can use regular expressions in search and replace makes this very simple, Notepad++ works well on windows and is free), and then use the resultant file names directly in Handbrake (I have preencoded everything to H264), but you could as easily use them to rename the output of MakeMKV. Note this method is because I wanted to put the episode titles where they exist into the file name so for example “Arrow - s03e23 - My_Name_Is _Oliver_Queen.mkv”. If you are not bothered by that it makes life a bit simpler.
Then there are a small number of TV shows where the episode numbers of DVD and TVDB differ. Generally I just renamed to go with the order on TVDB as the path of least resistance. The only exception I made was for Firefly, where the shown order due to stupidity on the behalf of the TV channel does not match the story order, and I wanted to preserve the story order…
