I humbly request a new feature to be considered by the dev team. Would it be possible to have Plex NOT autoplay/continuous play/play next/etc. if the next unplayed episode is not logically next in order? This is a problem that we have encountered many times and it is very confusing and frustrating.
For example, I am downloading an entire TV series or season and the episodes are coming in at different speeds. If we watch episode 1 and it finishes, but episode 2 is not downloaded yet, Plex will autoplay the next unwatched episode. Could be episode 3 or episode 12.
We watched Silicon Valley that I thought was complete but actually was missing 3 episodes. We were very confused/lost on some of the later episodes. Once I realized the episodes were missing, I downloaded and watched them, but it made things even more confusing.
Could Plex create placeholders in the GUI for missing episodes? This would point out to me that perhaps a download has failed so I can fix it. If someone attempts to watch the TV show by pressing Play at the TV show’s home (most common way we start watching TV), but the next unwatched episode is one of these placeholders, Plex would show a warning that the episode is missing.
Another example that is not as common but still happens enough is that I’ve added episodes to the Media Library folder but for some reason, Plex fails to process them to include metadata. This could be a Plex, NAS server, network, internet, or database issue. Either way, the episode appears in Plex like “Episode 3” with no metadata. However, from the TV show home screen, the unwatched count on the season cover image shows the proper count. So, assuming all of the TV episodes are there, we press Play at the TV show home screen and start watching episodes. The problem is that for some reason, Plex skips over the unprocessed episodes and only plays episodes with metadata. (I would consider this a bug but I couldn’t find a post about it).
The placeholder idea would not work in the 2nd example because episode files do exist. So another idea/option is to keep track of un/watched episodes in a database table which is compared to the episode lineup. When Plex or a person goes to play a TV show or episode and it is not the next episode in order, show the warning message that they are about to watch out of order. Give the user the options like exit back to the TV show home, play the proper next episode, play this episode anyways.
I’m sure there could be other/better methods to manage this but please do something about it.
Thanks
