Season 00/Specials with iTunes Managing the Library

General Discussions
1

I noticed none of the Specials or “No Season” episodes were appearing in Plex, so I read the article on creating the “Season 00” folder in the show’s parent folder (naming the folder “Specials”, as per the article, did not work for me). I have a few issues, and since I’m fairly new to the Plex game, I was hoping some of the more knowledgable people would be willing to help me out…

I still use iTunes to manage and rename all of the files in my library, and I’d like to leave it this way if possible. I use iFlicks 2 to add the metadata from TheTVDb and TheMovieDb for all of my shows and movies. I’m able to successfully use TheTVDb to add the proper metadata for the “Specials”, but unfortunately, iTunes leaves a “Special” in the show’s parent directory, which prevents it from loading in Plex.

I first created a “Specials” folder and moved the files in there, but that didn’t work, even after I updated the library. I then renamed the folders “Season 00”, which worked to some degree…

  1. The shows appeared, but none of the metadata that was loaded by iFlicks showed up in Plex.

  2. Plex treated the specials as Season 1 episodes for certain things. For example, they both played fine separately, but when marking them as watched/unwatched the same episode number in Specials and in Season 1 were affected. Also, if I added any of the special episodes to a playlist that contained the same episode number from Season 1, the Season 1 episode was replaced with the special episode.

Issues 1 and 2 keep me from using Plex to view these episodes. Does anyone have an explanation for these issues?

I’d like to leave iTunes managing the library, as I still use iTunes for music (Apple Music is great). I know I can move all of the TV Shows and Movies out of iTunes and have them managed solely by Plex, which I’m open to, but I’d like to know if there are any options for me. Also, to make the Specials load with the “Season 00” folder, I have to create the folder and move the files myself (not a big deal, there aren’t that many specials anyway), but this then breaks access to the shows in iTunes. When iTunes regains access to the shows, they are moved back into the parent directory. Is there any good way for me to handle this, if issues 1 and 2 above can be fixed?

Thanks for your help!

2

I’d like to know this as well

3

I used FileBot for making these up, and with that app it makes a Specials and then names each episode based on the air dat of S00Exx (Ordering them by air date)

TVRename can do this, too. As can SickBeard/Rage and Sonarr. This is easy to do, and play in the airing order. (The Walking Dead specials play in the order they aired in, so with a special showing up mid-season, you would watch it between the main episodes of the show. Any of these apps can handle renaming things for you NOW and shouldn’t screw up your watched status. (Been a long time since I did this, so use copy/rename to test it first… It might break.)

So to answer #1 above, this is a naming convention issue in all likelihood. Follow the guide here: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200220707-Naming-TV-Show-Specials-

issue 2 on the OP’s list has never happened to me, partly because I have followed the naming conventions since before I started using Plex. (It was the conventions I used way back in the day.)

For other naming matching issues there are conventions as well: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200220687-Naming-Series-Season-Based-TV-Shows Follow these and the first link and you should never have a problem.

Once I found Plex I stopped using iTunes for anything except music. Plex does all videos, movies or TV shows, home videos or educational stuff I have on my system. I switched everything to Plex and haven’t regretted it one bit!