A lot of old cartoons have combined episodes in one file.
Ed Edd n Eddy for example has two episodes per file. Plex already has the capability of naming the file something like ‘S01E01E02’ and both episodes will show up in the library. They just play the same video file.
Well I imagine this would be an easy implementation. Instead of having to crop each video or seek until you find the next episode, there should be an option to set start and end times in the metadata or video info.
“Season 1 Epieosde 1 start time: 00:00:00. Season 1 Episode 1 end time: 11:42:00”
“Season 1 Episode 2 start time: 11:43:00. Season 1 Episode 2 end time: 20:52:00”
There are other posts for this but they dont seen to have any activity and most are from 2012.
One comment mentions “This would be a P.I.T.A for people who have over 100 series in their library. There should be a way to scrape times from the tvdb” - Only problem with scraping is that there isnt one single source for episodes. Some people get dvd rips other people download from hundreds of different sources(Not advocating piracy). While scraping would be nice for shows with full unaltered video files, there needs to be a manual override for shows or movies that do not fall under that category. Some people see it as a pain, others(including me) see it as an extremely easier solution than having to crop 100+ series into their own episodes or fast forward every time you want to watch the 2nd episode of the file.
Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but…
I think a better (or more realistic and/or easier to implement) goal is to have plex seek to the next chapter.
Most old cartoons and new cartoons segments start and end at about the same time.
Take Ed, Edd n Eddy for instance. Almost every segment ends and starts around 10:50-10:55 mark. If there was a chapter mark there then plex could seek to it automatically when you play the next episode.
Adding chapters are super easy to do and can be done in batch, processing hundreds of files in seconds.
I would prefer the start and end times so that I could avoid having to break up files but still be able to easily watch things. I would settle for the chapters thing mentioned before too
I have had this issue for a long time but the way that multi episode TV files are handled in plex is terrible. I recently thought of a great way to implement a way to remedy this so I wanted to pitch that here and see if someone could look into it and give me their thoughts. My idea is as follows:
Make it possible though the edit section on TV shows (Where general, tags, poster, background etc… is) to choose a timestamp to start the video. This would allow people to manually fix all of these episodes by having episode 1 of a file to start at 0, and manually change the timestamp of the 2 “fake entries” that are linked to the same file so that if you play episode 2 of that multi episode file, it will start playing from 22:00 as an example.
In my opinion this is the best way to handle situations like this because it allows for the multi episode feature to be completely seamless during playback instead of forcing users to remember that this particular show they are on is a multi episode show.
PS: I am not sure how the “intro detection” feature" works but I love it and maybe it is possible to auto detect some of these timestamp offsets on episodes as well in the future automating some of the process as well. (just a thought but the baseline feature would be amazing.)
Thanks again and I hope you guys think this is a good solution.
Not a fan (sorry) – personally I prefer the “sibling” suggestion which is trying to improve this by creating only a single library entry for such multi-episode files (ideally reflecting the episode range, titles and descriptions of the individual episodes in that single item’s details)
Fixing individual timestamps seems excessive and will most likely be inaccurate / hard to match.
I understand what you are saying but what I was trying to say was that you would manually add a timestamp (not automatically meaning that it is up to the person to be accurate) to the ghost entry to start an episode where the part b episode begins.
The only reason I am not a fan of your idea is because there are sometimes when I have a long 3 or 4 part special which is technically 3 episodes and to have a single file which in plex shows as 1 entry with 3 different pieces of meta data makes it where I have to navigate an hour long special instead of being able to click an episode and start at 23:47 as an example.
Edit: Also I am all for your idea if you still had an option for something like this that I am suggesting, again especially in the cases where a 2 or 3 part special would be an hour or 2 hour feature length special and there should be a way to have it in the episodic chunks originally given
