Server is completely ignoring sXXeXX convention for two episodes

[SuperDave1426]

Server Version#: 1.19.3.2764
Player Version#: N/A

Ok, this is making me crazy. The server generally doesn’t seem to have any trouble telling the difference between TV episodes, especially when using the sXXeXX format that is described elsewhere on the Plex website. But in this particular case, it seems to think that episode 15 and episode 1 are exactly the same file.

I’ve got several specials in the Specials directory for a TV series, and they’re all named s00e01 - s00e19. The server displays everything fine - except that it’s decided to merge s00e01 with s00e15. The thumbnail calls it episode one and gives it title, poster, etc., for episode one, which is great, but it has the little “2” showing in the corner that says it thinks two files are involved here.

If I hit the three-dot menu and select Info, it lists both files - both clearly named as they are with their respective filenames and s00e01 & s00e05 in those names. I’ve tried moving both of them out of the directory and rescanning the library in the server. Both together, or one at a time, and none of it makes any difference. If I move s00e01 out, leaving just s00e15 in, it still calls it episode one and lists all the information for that episode.

I’ve tried copying the files out of the directory, selecting the “delete” option from within the server, optimizing the database & cleaning bundles, then putting them back. If I just move s00e15, it still thinks that it’s looking at episode one!

I’m at my whit’s end here. I’m on the verge of just giving up and deleting the Specials directory as being just too much work to be worth it. But I figured I’d at least post here as one last final act of desperation. Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing this particular issue, and more importantly, how to fix it??

I can manually override episode name, description, etc., but can’t override the episode number, so even if I were to do that, as soon as I add s00e01 back into the directory and re-scan the library, they get merged again.

HELP! {insert emoticon of beating head against table}

[dane22]

To avoid shaking a crystal ball, wasting time or simply start guessing, I strongly suggest you provide us with:

• Real Filenames of the involved items
• Screenshot of the files in file explore, starting from the root of the TV-Show and down to the actual file

If above doesn’t help, we also needs a zip with all the PMS logs, right after having reproduced the problem

[SuperDave1426]

Hi, Dane, thanks for the reply.

Sorry for not providing sufficient information in my first post. This is from a somewhat ecchi Anime series, and didn’t want to offend anyone who might be sensitive to such things, and I had hoped that simply describing the sXXeXX scenario would suffice. My bad, I guess. I can see where more detail is going to useful, so I’ll go ahead and post everything relevant here.

Here’s the screenshot of the directory in question:

It shows the full names and path to them, as requested. Regarding episodes s00e14-s00e19, the “S2” at the start of the rest of the filename is just a note to myself that the those specials came from the season two disk of the series. I’ve used that with other series, and it’s never caused confusion as long as s00e01, etc., was being followed. To be sure, I tried removing the “S2” notation and re-scanned, etc., but it hasn’t made any difference.

Now, here’s the full server page showing the Specials for the series:

As you will see, “Episode 1” has the little “2” in the upper left of the thumbnail; it thinks two files provide this episode as I understand it.

Selecting “Get Info” from the menu for that episode:

As you can see, it sees both filenames correctly, despite it deciding that they’re both part of the same episode.

Oh, also - I forgot to mention this in my original posting, but one other episode of the specials it’s getting lost over. Here’s a picture of the “Get Info” screen for what it is identifying as “Episode 501” (at the bottom of the screen):

As for the PMS logs you mentioned, I’ve located the “PMS Plugin Logs” directory, which is what I’m assuming you are referring to. Here’s the archive of that directory:
[deleted]

So you wouldn’t have to wade through a ton of non-related stuff from there, I shut down the server, deleted the log files, and restarted the server. Simply rescanning the library didn’t do much, so I move the Specials directory out of the path that Plex looks at, scanned the library in Plex so that it would remove Specials, then move it back in place and re-scanned the library, which definitely produced a bit more logs than I got simply re-scanning with it just left in place.

I hope these help identify what the problem is. Please let me know if there’s anything else I need to provide.

Thanks!

Edit: On the (probably likely) chance that I misunderstood what you needed when you said to upload the PMS Logs, I re-did it (cleared out logs so you wouldn’t have to wade through months’ worth of old data & restarted the server, then did the move-and-rescan of the library) and this time am including the .7z of the entire Logs directory.
Again, if there’s anything else you need from me to get this sorted out, please let me know!
Thanks.
[Deleted]

Hey, upon closer inspection of the information in the logs, I’m not all warm and fuzzy about posting them publicly, due to personal information appearing in them. Is it ok with you if I PM the full Logs directory .7z archive to you?

[dane22]

It’s fine by PM’ing me the logs

What scanner/agent are you using?

And might be that above get’s confused about the filename, when more numbers are present?

Try renaming s00e15 into Girls Special -S00E15- [S2 Episode 4.5] Kojiro in Maid Training.mkv

Stuff in brackets are supposed to be ignored by agents/scanners

[OttoKerner]

You might have to perform the Plex Dance not only with the file s00e15 , but also with the s00e01. i.e. the one it’s been confused with.

[dane22]

You provided me with logs in a DM, but I failed to see you tried what both me and @OttoKerner suggested first?

[SuperDave1426]

Wow, that was fast. Hang in there - I first sent you the logs, and then came back here to follow up with additional info.

@dane22 Actually, at one point I went so far as to remove the entire “S2 Episode 4.5” text from the filename and it didn’t do any good. However, I don’t think I did the full Plex Dance on it, so I guess it might have been hanging on to old info somehow, despite rescanning the library. I’ll do that and get back to you. (I just want to get something in here so that you’ll know I’m working on it.) I kinda hated the idea of losing that information, but wanted it to work. Thanks for the information about Plex ignoring things in brackets; I’ll absolutely keep that in mind for future reference, especially if this next test works.

@OttoKerner Actually, at one point I did the Plex Dance with the entire Specials directory. I’m gonna try it again after putting brackets around the part of the filename as Dane suggested above.

Also - in my original posting, I included a separate episode that it keeps calling episode 501 (and it’s failing to get any metadata for it), even tough the filename clearly uses s00e05, and has no other special filename attributes. The other episodes in that segment (Picture Scroll 1-4, s00e01 - s00e04) are found and called appropriately; even the episode one information is correct, it’s just that it seems to think that s00e15 is also part of that. Just figured I’d mention that here.

From my having read a bit before making my first posting, I saw mention of the Plex Dance, and my understanding of it is that you make a copy of the episode(s) or whatever to another directory, tell Plex to delete the episode(s) in question, click on “Clean bundles” in the Troubleshooting section of settings, copy the file(s) back to their proper location, and then rescan the library. Please let me know if I got that wrong, and if so, what the term actually applies to.

I’ll do another posting here as soon as I finish the other stuff you suggested.

[OttoKerner]

@SuperDave1426

the Plex Dance, and my understanding of it is that

See: The Plex Dance ™

[SuperDave1426]

Ah ok, so I was mostly right. I don’t have to do the “copy and then delete from within the Plex server” thing, I can just scan after moving it out of the path that Plex is looking at and then do all the other stuff after scanning so it knows the season/episode(s) is gone. Cool, thanks. That saves time, since moving to somewhere else on the same drive is a LOT faster than copying. Thanks for that!

Anyway, back to the testing. I’ll post here once I’ve finished.

[SuperDave1426]

Ok, here were the initial results. I tried naming the file like @dane22 suggested, and the result was that while s00e15 did get separated from s00e01, it ended up becoming the new Episode 501 in the listing, with the other one being moved to 502:

So, moving along. The question was asked about what scanner and agent I’m using. For the Anime TV Series library, I’ve been using Absolute Series Scanner with the MyAnimeList.net scanner:

The reason for this is that over a year ago, when I first installed Plex, I was discovering that I was having to do an awful lot of manual work when it came to adding Anime series (and movies, for that matter) to my library. It couldn’t always find the correct episode information. I now suspect that at least some of that has to do with the way that episodes are typically numbered in Anime series - which usually doesn’t consist of sXXeXX naming. Here’s a couple of examples:

I think that should give you the idea.

From everything I was reading at the time, it sounded like if the filenames got modified to follow the sXXeXX format that I’d probably have better luck. But frankly, the though of having to go through a series with four seasons and twenty-six episode per season, to manually rename files as s01e01, s01e02, etc., gave me a headache to even consider it… Still does, for that matter…

Since I was having problems specifically with Anime series, I did a bunch of hunting and found the MyAnimeList.net agent, which sounded perfect for getting the plot synopsis for series. Its discussion thread mentioned that it worked best with Better Absolute Scanner (BABS). I found that and installed it, but it had some quirks that I didn’t really care for, so I found what I assumed was the “original” that BABS was supposed to be “better” than, which was simply Absolute Series Scanner. I installed that, and things have run swimmingly ever since.

Well, until now, anyway…

So, as a test, for the Anime TV Series library, I set it back to use the Plex Media Scanner. It worked! The episodes in the Specials directory are all displaying correctly. Since none of the specials have descriptive episode text that I know of, I don’t know if the agent is correctly finding information for those episodes.

I also notice that the Plex Media Scanner doesn’t recognize common conventions for Anime series of naming separate (usually creditless, aka “clean”) openings and endings for the show of using NCOP / NCED / OP / ED, or ED01, ED02 ( or NCED01, NCED02), etc., because upon viewing the results, I see that those are simply being called “Episode 101,” “Episode 102,” etc., instead of Opening 01, Ending 01, etc.

I guess it’s a minor annoyance to have to manually edit those manually to name them correctly again. And like I said, I haven’t tried a test yet on one of the other directories where sXXeXX doesn’t even exist, so $DIETY only knows how that’s going to turn out…

I’ll check around - maybe there’s still development going on for Absolute series scanner and there could be a newer version than the one that I installed over a year ago; if so, maybe it’ll fix this particular issue.

I’ll let you know. I really hope so, 'cause like I said, the though of having to go through everything and rename files to add sXXeXX makes my brain hurt…

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.!

Thanks for all the info so far.

[Elijah_Baley]

The “sXXeXX” is actually only part of what is needed for good matching. See the following:

---

TV Shows <- The TV library points here
_______ShowName (year)
____________Season 01
__________________ShowName (year) - s01e01 - Optional Name.ext
__________________ShowName (year) - s01e02 - Optional Name.ext
__________________and so on for the shows in season 01
____________Season 02 <- just like Season 01
____________Season 03 <- and so on for each season
____________Season 00 <- or “Specials”
__________________ShowName (year) - s00e01 - Optional name
__________________ShowName (year) - s00e02 - Optional name
__________________and so on for each special
Note 1: the eXX part of the specials must match EXACTLY what is found in TheTVDB
Note 2: The (year) may be omitted for shows that do not have more than one occurrence throughout the years.

There are many other structures and naming systems that work but this is the one I use and it just works.

For a mass rename I use FileBot with this format string {n.replaceTrailingBrackets()} - {s00e00.lower()} - {t}

---

You have a bunch of junk that is meaningless to Plex in those names and it looks like you do not even have the show name first.

It is hard for my old eyes to read the graphic pages you have posted (no fault of yours but just the result of me being old.) so I am not 100% sure your naming is wrong but I believe it is, There are some special considerations for Anime but I think those names are still wrong.

[SuperDave1426]

@Elijah_Baley Thanks for the reply. I hear ya on the trying to read those screenshots in the above posting; I kinda have trouble seeing them myself. In case you didn’t know, if you click on one of the images, it’ll expand to the original size, which I find is a LOT easier to read.

Yes, I know that’s the naming convention that works best for Plex and am pretty sure that I’ve already acknowledged that. I also indicated that it’s a definite problem for Anime series because they’re not typically named that way (some are, sure, but for the most part, nope).

Also, as I noted above, these particular files are using the sXXeXX convention, so that’s not the issue here. Directory naming is per Plex guidelines.

All the files that were listed in the example screenshots I gave above work just fine in Plex when using the Absolute Series Scanner for that library instead of the Plex Media Scanner like I use in the regular TV Shows library.

A bit of info regarding Absolute Series Scanner:

Absolute series scanner functions that differes from Plex Series Scanner

.plexignore’ fully working including subfolders
YouTube playlist with id in series or season folder get added without numbering/renaming needed
Video files inside zip file gets displayed (not playable)
Seamless ‘Grouping folder’: For example ‘Dragon Ball/[01] Dragon Ball/ep xxx.ext’
Season folder advance support: ‘Season xxx title_for season’
Episode grouping in transparent/Ark folders: ‘[01] Saga xxx’, ‘[02] Story xxx’, ‘[03] Arc xxx’
Episode title is taken from the filename (to be re-written by the agent but usefull if series is not matched yet)
Japanese and Specials chars handling (“CØDE：BREAKER”) and files starting with dots (“.Hack”)
AniDB numbering support ((NC)OP/(NC)ED/SpXX, etc…)
Movies in series libraries support (names same as folder or contain " - Complete Movie")
Forced id in series name or id file for the agent gets passed through
Display absolute series without file renaming displayed with seasons (tvdb2/3/4) or remapped chronology wise (tvdb5) or anidb sereis grouped and displayed as tvdb series (anidb2, need mapping accurate in scudlee files to work)
Use sagas as seasons keeping absolute numbering with TVDB4 and it create even the seasons for you from a database if not specified
Versatile file format support. if a logical numbering format isn’t supported let me know (no episode number in brackets or parenthesis though, that’s moronic)
put per-series logs (‘xxx.filelist.log’ and ‘xxx.scanner.log’ in /Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Data/com.plexapp.agents.hama/DataItems/Logs).

That’s what makes adding these series to Plex a LOT easier. I just don’t have the time (nor desire, really) to go through a ton of files in a multi-season series manually renaming a bunch of files to conform to sXXeXX style. So this is a solution that works. Well, for the most part…

@dane22 @OttoKerner As a followup, I did find a newer version of Absolute Series Scanner, though it didn’t help - using that scanner causes the problems again in the Specials directory. I’ve had no problems at all with any other series that I’ve added; I cannot figure out what’s weird about this particular series that the episodes in the Specials directory act up this way.

Here’s the kicker though - Dane, you had suggested that I try renaming the file because there might be something else that’s causing confusion.

I decided to take that idea to the extreme - I renamed every file (except for the opening and ending credit files since they were fine) to remove everything in the filename except s00e01, s00e02, etc.

It worked. With the Absolute Season Scanner in use, it had no problems and correctly identified all the episode names and didn’t try to combine anything.

Go figure. So yeah, your hunch about something in the filename causing the scanner to get confused appears to have been right on. Out of curiosity Dane, did you have a chance to look over the logs, and did it give you any clues?

I guess the mystery is solved for now. If nothing else, fighting through this has taught me a lot better about the workings of the server.

I guess I’ll wrap this up here (though if you did glean any insights from those logs, please do post them, 'cause I’d love to know what they show). Thanks again for the help to all who replied here.