Switch between episode ordering while only following one file naming convention? //mod:display order

Feature Suggestions
1

Have a way to seamlessly switch between “Air Date” and “DVD Order” while only using one of the latter to name the file structure.

2

Just to make sure I understand your suggestion right…
You want some means to re-arrange how Plex displays the episodes?
While the files are e.g. sorted in DVD order and the show is configured as such – you want an option to re-arrange the listing / playback order inside Plex to the aired / absolute order?

3

Yes, exactly like that. Some people in the household would like to only watch the aired seasons in whilst others prefer going through all of them in one go in sequence. I want to have a means to change this on the fly and at least per series arrangement as per users needs.

4

This would be amazing. And while you can currently choose an order to reflect your files-on-disk naming, it means you’re stuck with that, or forced to rename all the files to view them in another order.

There’s a bunch of series where this would solve people’s problems. Futurama, Firefly, The Office (US) to name 3 fairly popular ones. My latest frustration has been Charlie & Lola, which is a bit all over the place and even has different DVD orders in US vs EU. There’s also a lot of series where multi-part episodes are simply counted differently in aired vs DVD orders, so episodes get out of sync.

I think Futurama is perhaps the worst, and has discussions going on for at least 8 years on this… 8 years ago, 4 years ago, 2 months ago… with various reboots creating new confusion. Files may be in Aired, DVD, Production or Streaming order, and everyone seems to have their own preference as to how they present in Plex.

Sometimes reboots or changes in networks create a new preferred ordering, if an old one is broken. Or a later DVD release makes more sense than what you started with.

From what I can see, both TVDB and TMDB store episodes as discrete items, which can be placed into multiple different orders or episode groups. This means it should be possible to map from one ordering to another.

It would then be so much simpler to keep your library of files in the order you acquired/archived it or originally named it, while presenting it to viewers in the currently preferred order (which could change next time the show is re-released, rebooted or changes network).

5

Allow users to pick which display order is used via TMDB Episode Groups or TVDB Alternative Orders without needing to have the files in that order… mapping the file order to a display order.

For Example - Series could be stored on disk via TMDB aired order, but mapped to TMDB Episode groups

Disk stored using TMDB Aired

/Series Name:
       /Season 1
                       Episode 1
                       Episode 2
       /Season 2
                       Episode 1
       /Season 3
                       Episode 1

Plex showing the same files using TMDB Alterative Group without following x Alternative order within the file name.


TMDB Alternative Order
/Series Name:
       /Season 1
                       Episode 1
                       Episode 2
       /Season 2
                       Episode 1
                       Episode 2

All while keeping the files in the original TVDB / TMDB aired order.

Trust this makes sense.

6

Just to add to this, this would also allow anime users to show OVA (Specials) between normal episodes as intended, where OVA episodes are like episode 14.5 (S01E14.5)

7

Would also like to note that TMDB already does the mapping for this within episode groups, so plex would know the original order;

Example: Mushoku Tensei - episode group for Cours, has 4 cours + OVA’s clicking into each core also shows the original mapping i.e S01E01 etc so its all about just letting plex display the episodes is that way without having to touch the actual files on disk.

8

I’m not sure how this suggestion will help with placing specials among the episodes.
If there’s a custom order supporting the specials/OVAs among the regular seasons, you can already do that (as long as the custom order is available on TVDb). There’s a feature suggestion to also support TMDb release groups.

Edit: there’s also a suggestion to support non-integer season/episode numbers.

Let’s keep this suggestion focused on an option to let users switch between orderings (independent of how the files are organized).

9

I still am keeping it independent, just pointing out obvious benefits in the case specific to anime and OVA’s I could keep all my files in TVDB aired naming and structure and then plex can map them via TMDB episode groups or TVDB alternative ordering without the need to restructure the files. every file can keep one standard format but If I want to display x show in a different way I just tell plex to show me it in that order without ever touching the files.

TVDB Aired is pretty standard for organizing media so keeping everything against that and telling plex mapping and displaying it which ever way is available sounds like a killer feature to me.

Would also help keep any other software that replies on TVDB naming/structure to continue to work.