I started to watch an episode of The Rockford Files last night and realized I had the episodes out of order. It was only for a 2 part story. I have always named TV episodes with a postfixed “-0X” for multipart episodes. (Of course the X is replaced with number for the story part.) It’s never been an issue and helps me keep them straight. I’ve done it with other episodes in this same season with no issue:
You can see one two-parter boxed in blue. It shows up fine on Plex. The one in green is the issue. The numbers were not postfixed, so I added them (and corrected the episode numbers so they are in the right order). Once I did that, I hit “Scan library files.” done that multiple times. These episodes are gone, which I expected with a new file name, but I would expect Plex to pick them up when I had it scan the library files, but it hasn’t.
How do I get Plex to see these files and include them with the new names?
Interesting that post is from 2017, is apparently still an issue and that Plex has not added a “Rescan Directory,” or “Rescan Library” function in that 8 years. At least it’s fixable. I’ll report back about how it works.
Deleted my original comment. I just realized they’re different episode numbers. I’m thinking either they got combined somewhere or plex can’t see them (permissions?)
That they got combined was my first thought, too - but it’s a 22 episode season, and I’m seeing (on the Plex web interface, since it’s the easiest way to check and I’m there for rescanning anyway), 20 episodes, so both are missing. I’ve done things like this before and it’s been picked up on a rescan.
So I’m trying what @TheLivingBubba suggested and seeing how it works. Makes sense - make sure Plex sees it as gone, then restore it.
Okay rereading your post, you said you renumbered the episodes? So what was the original number? They were the same episode number I bet. Because that’s probably what is confusing plex. You really should stick to matching episodes with tvdb.
But yeah a plex dance should fix this. Just move the entire season out, then rescan, purge, put it back in and rescan.
Originally S05E20 was S05E21 - just swapped the order of them, but also added the “-01” and “-02” on the ends, which I realize is what caused the problem, but, for me, I really prefer having them there since I do a lot of work through the command line and want to see something there so I don’t end up seeing two episodes with the same name and thinking, “I have a mistake here…” (Same thing if I I see the files listed in a window on my Mac.)
I get that if all I did was swap the two episode numbers, it wouldn’t have mattered, since the same names would still be there and about all that might change is the image it shows in the library. But, as I said, there were reason I wanted to add the suffix.
Did the Plex dance and it’s working fine - everything is there now.
I doubt it. It would be a matter of deleting files in that directory (or on the library), which is is pretty easy, but then if the rescan were interrupted for some reason, you’d lose data.
There would be an issue with keeping track of what was and wasn’t watched, but I can think of at least 2 ways to do that without even putting thought into it.
