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So I know that this question was asked, and fixed 2 years ago.
The problem is, that the fix is not working.
I have a lot of cartoons that are double episodes. When doing playback, all double episodes play twice. It’s the exact same bug that was asked, and fixed 2 years ago. However, it’s still happening.
I just watched this, this morning with my grand daughter.
All of these played twice.
I don’t put a hyphen in my naming and it’s working as expected - watch e01e02 and birth show as played.
Title - s01e02 - subtitle.mkv
What if you have all those episodes on auto-play?
I’ve tried both naming conventions for kids shows and I never got it to work correctly
Kids shows are terrible because even combined episodes are still very short. Parents don’t want to come back every 10 minutes to start a new episode
The big caveat with multi-episode files and Plex is that, no matter the episode you start playback, it always starts from the beginning of the first episode (assuming there’s no playback history to continue). That is, if a multi-episode file is marked as unplayed, and you tell it to play episode two, it is going to start at the beginning of episode one. And if you start playback of a multi-episode file, the client (at least the ones I’ve tested) shows the complete runtime of all the episodes.
If you start playback of a multi-episode file, when the first episode ends the second begins immediately. If you subsequently stop playback, the total time played is reflected, including both the first episode and the time played of the second episode; because full runtime of episode 1 plus partial episode 2 equals partial runtime of episodes 1 + 2.
This is not intuitive and can lead to some false assumptions regarding how multi-episode files work in Plex. Particularly that last point can make it seem like Plex is accurately tracking the episodes individually when it is not.
Autoplaying of episodes exacerbates the situation because, when started, it will seem to play episodes one and two back-to-back (because it plays the full file regardless). Both episodes are then marked as played; when playback of episode two is requested ti starts at the beginning of episode one again (and repeats both). Finally, when complete, it will start playback of episode three (and four, based on your organization).
What I would suggest here is that you split the files into their constituent episodes instead of using multi-episode files. The simple fact is that Plex just doesn’t handle them well at this point. There may be a feature suggestion or two floating around for them to do better.
The downside, is that I have many 100s of ‘multi-episode’ shows. It’s not that I can’t split them up, but we are talking about hours and hours of work that I need to do, to compensate for a bug in Plex.
It seemed that this bug was addressed a couple of years ago, specifically for cartoons, which do run between 5 and 7 minutes.
If it was addressed years ago, why is it that it’s still a problem?
I’m a programmer by trade, so I do get the complexities of programming.
But it would seem to be a minor correction to simply mark both episodes ‘played’ when playing a multi-episode file.
And in the link I attached above, that was the correction that was made (back in 2019 I think). So I don’t understand why it’s still an issue.
Also, it makes no difference if I do ‘S01E01E02’ or ‘S01E01-E02’ it gives me the same issue either way.
I do, however, think the problem only exists on short shows. I’ve tried the same thing on 40 minute TV shows that are double episode, and that appears to work fine.
Most of these cartoons, being only 5 to 7 minutes, perhaps there is an algorithm in place that causes this bug on short shows, where the algorithm works fine on long shows.
I’ve resorted to using a terrible naming convention to get things to work on auto-play
It looks like I’m missing every other episode in the UI but functionality outweighs aesthetics when it comes to 4-year-old twin boys
Thanks
Based on my research, my believe is that this bug only happens on very short programs (probably under 10 minutes), which is primarily cartoons.
It would be really nice to see Plex support fix this, this shouldn’t be too hard of a fix.
It appears to work correctly on ‘normal length’ programs of 30-45 minutes, at least, the ones I’ve tried (‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ for example) appears to work fine with double episodes.
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