My plex library for Movies/TV is all tagged and named 99.9% in line with recommended practice, so it matches accurately with TVDB. All is perfect for Movies & TV.
My question is, and in my case for the 0.01% of shows that don’t match TVDB (all Looney Tunes cartoons), why can’t Plex just fallback to using the filename?
Instead of showing 356 cartoons as “Episode 1, Episode 2…etc” it would at least have the short’s/episide name.
The way TVDB deals with cartoons is to put them in decades which makes no sense as when you go to watch them they’re not in the order per the DVD release.
If you are dealing with such a long-running series as Looney Tunes, it makes total sense to use the release years as season numbers. And that’s all there is to it. These are regular season numbers, just like all other series in Plex have as well. The only difference is that they have 4 digits, instead of just one or two.
There are countless different disc releases. Each often with their own order of episodes, while omitting other episodes completely. Either for commercial, technical, or political reasons. It doesn’t make much sense to put each of these different releases into a central metadata repository, as there are many differences across years, and market locations.
That’s why metadata sources like TheMovieDB or TheTVDB are preferring the original release/airing date as the primary ordering criterium.
Depending on the series, TheTVDB does also have sometimes different “episode orderings” available. Some have a “DVD order”. You can use these in Plex.
Whilst I appreciate your (somewhat condescending) reply, it doesn’t actually answer my question as to why Plex can’t revert to showing filenames - rather you seem to want to profess the “total sense” TVDB makes.
Interesting that music management recognises compilations as separate albums, so no reason why dvd releases of compilations can’t work similarly.
