Not displaying episodes 100 through 199

Plex Media Server
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1

Server Version#: 1.26.2.5797
Player Version#: 4.76.1

Behavior seems consistent across clients that I use (web, android, and roku). TV shows in a single season above episode 99 are not displayed in the player’s listings.

Episodes 0 through 99 show up fine. Episodes 200 and above are displayed fine as well (at least up to several hundred - I don’t have any with a 1000+ yet, so I can’t speak to that.

So, if you have, for example, 493 episodes in Season 01, you will see a summary that says 393 episodes, and the listing will show episodes up to 99, then skip the next hundred, and the following line will be for episode 200.

If you have more than 100 but less than 200 episodes, it would seem as if everything past episode 99 was missing. (I read a couple threads that sounded like this latter case).

Hopefully, I can get a more thoughtful response than the usual ‘tell us how your files are named’ twaddle. The file naming is per guidance, and I have bulk renamed and tried a couple of different ways of naming just to see if it made a difference. It didn’t.

This seems hard to see as anything other than somebody made an ‘oopty’ when coding a boundary condition, no? Probably server side unless all clients are using the same list display logic. Just my guess.

Anyway, don’t see anything addressing this in the help, so posting here. Hope it helps. Not invested in doing more about this on my end, but hey, if you’re bored and you wanna fix your stuff, here is something you could check into :slight_smile:

<preemptive snark is based on every other interaction I’ve ever had with Plex staff when reporting an issue. If it doesn’t apply to you, please ignore.>

2

Man, if I had a nickel for every time someone wrote that line in these forums and, then when they finally did show the names, they had implemented their interpretation of Plex’s guidance…

But seriously, what does it hurt to show your filenames? It should only take you a moment to gather the information and paste in a screenshot or two. I’d recommend showing the full file path, at least from the point where you have Plex watching down to the files. Show both working and non-working examples. If there’s truly nothing out of order it will likely lead to more questions.

Something to keep in mind, since you’ve mentioned trying different naming conventions (you did end up back at the recommended guidance, right?) would be to Plex Dance the files in question after making changes. The reason being that sometime Plex will detect files as duplicates when there is potential ambiguity in the names. The Plex Dance will cause Plex to forget those files; a simple scan will not always do that.

Something else to try, if you haven’t already, would be to ensure that all your series with 3-digit episode numbers use three digits for all episodes. For example, for a series with 300 episodes, you would use:

Series Name - S01E001.ext
...
Series Name - S01E300.ext

A final suggestion would be to ensure that you’re using the “TheTVDB (Absolute)” episode ordering for the series (advanced show settings) if you’ve named them all with the “S01” prefix (instead of breaking them up by season).

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:+1: :+1: :+1:

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I’d love to hear from somebody who has a plausible explanation for the software’s behavior, or a known working counterexample.

Cause, gosh, if I had a shiny copper penny for every time someone offered neither one, but still thought I should expend my time exploring their theorizing, well, I’d probably be able to afford to buy all your nickels.

Seriously, does anyone have a single season with more than 100 episodes that displays correctly.?

Differential diagnosis typically gets much further than point and stab guesswork, and I’d love to hear your configuration in regards file naming; agent, library, or show configuration, or anything else you deem relevant.

I’m assuming somebody must. I see from this forum and reddit that others have run into the issue I am describing. I haven’t seen anybody respond that they have a working example.

I would think it shouldn’t be that rare given any daily or weekday show will fall into this scenario over the course of a year.

To provide some of the details on my configuration and testing for comparison - yes, the episode numbers were padded to three digits with leading zeros. Yes, the various tests I have done involved re-scanning, adding completely new files, adding a completely new show with completely different files, creating a new library with a new show, with new files, etc. Same result each time. There are no ‘working examples’.

There is, of course, no potential ambiguity in filenames in a single directory. I could imagine there could be ambiguity resulting from a poorly implemented parsing algorithm, but that seems a lower probability to me. It would be a particularly peculiar failing to have the parsing work correctly from 0-99 and from 200 on but not in between. Still it’s imaginable. I have seen other infrequent errors in plex’s filename parsing in the past. It seems even less likely that file pathing would be an issue given the behavior described.

My episode ordering was set to the library default (as ordered on disk), but I changed it to ‘TheTVDB (Absolute)’ on one show per suggestion. It made no difference to the problem, although it did pull in external metadata. (I didn’t actually want this metadata which is why I previously had the agent set to prefer local media assets). Anyway, it made no difference to the problem. So that’s not it.

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Sure, I can give you multiple examples of formats that dont work. Show - [S01E01] - title.ext is the most common.

As for a show that has 100+ episodes that works?

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Please do us a favor and post actual file names. Sometimes your formatting could be as simple as forgetting an E in the wrong place. You can look at it repeatedly and not see the typo. Or it could be a more significant issue.

Lets start with actual file names of the affected shows, and then we can if needed request and review server logs. Plex’s parsing is really good if you follow the approved format. Using formats that work but are not approved will lead to problems.

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6

I dare you to share screenshots of the Library config, showing the folders referenced.

I double-dog dare you to share screenshots of the show folder names, season folder names and episode file names.

—-

Have you tried viewing the library for duplicates, or viewing by folder to identify items that may have been matched to other shows?

The most likely root cause of that would still be file naming, but it would also require a Plex Dance to fix after addressing naming.

—-

If you believe there’s a bug, I triple-dog dare you to share both naming screenshots and server logs.

—-

Or maybe we’re all idiots. That’s possible too.

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Thank you for your reply. If you read my reported issue carefully, you will see that it is about more than 100 episodes in a season, not in a show. And specifically it is about plex dropping episodes 100 through 199 from the episode list for a single season.

Unfortunately, your screenshot does not demonstrate a counterexample. When you look at the actual listing underlying the example you provided, do you see episode 1 through 99 for the same season from which your screenshot was taken?

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:slight_smile:

I quintuple hedgehog dare you to assert that

a) you recognize the problem from experience,
b) you know the cause of the problem, and
c) you know how to fix the problem

otherwise, we’re just engaged in theorizing, speculation, troubleshooting, and, very likely, a very long trip to nowhere.

I’m guessing we both understand that a competent appdev, with access to the code, would likely need a very limited amount of time to explain the software’s behavior, which is inconsistent, and therefore faulty, regardless of whether the end user is naming their files with tildes and tiddlywinks.

As for the final possibilty you mentioned, I have no opinion, but I accept your assertion.

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From my own experience as a software developer I can tell you: The more complex a software becomes the more difficult it is to say in advance exactly what the problem is or is not. Even with access to the code, it is often a very tedious and time-consuming process to understand why something is not working as it should. There are often too many variables that need to bo considered in the big picture.

This is exactly the reason why even basic things that have already been ruled out are rechecked.
This may be annoying and time consuming for those who have to answer the same questions two, three or many times but believe me it is worth it most of the time.
But if you instead have to explain exactly why each question is justified, then you quickly lose interest in explaining and helping. At least I always feel that way.

Which series are you trying to match that has more than 100 episodes in one season? Then I can try to reproduce that locally.

And first question is still valid: Please make a screenshot from your file naming.

10

Do you have a working counterexample?

In my experience, engaging in troubleshooting over an issue I don’t care much about and for which no one can proffer a ready explantion or solution has rarely been worthwhile, at least that’s how I feel about it.

I’ve reported the issue, so if a plex staffer wants to work on it, they can. If someone has had a similar experience and resolved it, I’d love to hear from them.

Otherwise I’d hope folks wouldn’t spend their time on it. I do thank you for the offer though.

FWIW, at a guess, plex isn’t so much complex as it is complicated. That’s one of the reasons I don’t go too far out of my way to try to bend it to my will. It’s kind of a chop one head off, watch three others arise type of beast.

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No, thats why I asked you for the series that you are trying to match which you aren’t willing to share.

Okay, then I try not to help :wink:

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@StephenBell

In this thread, some of the most skilled community members we have had tried to help you, and they all, and I do as well, have asked for a screen capture from your file system.

So please help us helping you!

And if you really don’t wanna provide screen captures, then please say so directly, so I can close this thread!

13

@StephenBell Time to put up or shut up, either let us help you and answer our questions or drop it.

Here is a screenshot of two different shows with over 100+ episodes in a season. I could provide more examples to counter your claims but I figure I’ve made my point.

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14

Without knowing your exact issue, there are 4-5 different things that could be causing this symptoms to happen. By asking for the details (screenshots of the underlying file names, and possibly eventually server logs ) We are starting with the most common root causes which address 95+% of issues.

We are not going to just throw half a dozen troubleshooting resolutions at you, as most users would get confused and overwhelmed. By spending a couple minutes asking some simple questions we can narrow down the root cause quite quickly.

Imaging going to the doctor, telling him your foot hurts, and asking for a cure. Guess what? He too will ask additional troubleshooting questions. Did you step on a nail? Run it over with a car? or what happened?

15

I thought it might be useful to demonstrate what diagnosis looks like when done properly, so I asked myself, ‘rather than just walk through a bunch of generic diagnostic steps founded on the presumption that the user is an ignoramus, what else could be suggested by someone with a genuine interest in solving a problem or identifying a system issue… what would a differential diagnosis look like if it wasn’t based on this assumption’?

Here is what I came up with…

I took the example given initially of 493 episodes in a single season, where plex summarizes instead that there are only 393 episodes and fails to display episode 100 through 199 in the episode list.

I then renamed the episodes e100 through e199 as e500 through e599 and re-scanned.

Note that the only difference is that the digit 1 has been replaced with the digit 5.

Guess what happened?

Yup, plex successfully summarized that there are 493 episodes and displays them all in the episode list.

Note that nothing has changed in file naming convention, file pathing, library or show configuration, doing or not doing the plex macarena, or any of the other assorted piffle associated with the ignoramus theory.

Now at this point, an intellectually honest person would likely conclude ‘Hey, plex fall down, go boom!’.

And they would be correct, but more importantly we have actually learned something. Feels good, doesn’t it?

But wait, maybe plex succeeded (sort of) because of some other reason, what happens if we change the names back? (it fails again!) or if we sequence the files such the 100s are in the 200’s place and the 200s in the 300s place, and so on? (hey, it succeeds again!), what if we used a frowned upon naming convention, but apply our new trick (hey, it succeeds despite the bad naming!).

Well, there you go, yes, plex fall down go boom, but know that I know where it fall down, go boom, I can work around it. Which, really, is all I ever hope for with plex.

It’s not bad software, and I don’t expect it to be perfect (an expectation it has fulfilled magnificently, btw), but it does have problems. This is one, I’ll just add it to my already sizeable bag of ‘weird stuff plex does’, and soldier on.

And like I said in my original post, I hope this helps. Not invested in doing more about this on my end, but hey, plex team, if you’re bored and you wanna fix your stuff, here is something you could check into.

Or, you know, close the thread, or call me names, or get in some more practice being condescending. Whatever work for you. :slight_smile:

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But it seems like YOU haven’t learned something. If you just go back to your old naming why do you expect Plex to behave differently? You know that Plex caches Stuff? You need to clear your cache first and then put those files back. You still assume plex is doing something wrong and you ignore all the facts being presented to you.

17

Thread closed, since OP doesn’t provide needed info

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