I’m surprised this still isn’t a feature that Plex supports. All that time I spent getting all of the extra content off my Blu-rays and DVDs…I figured Plex would have made the effort worthwhile.
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More than 5 years since this feature was requested - I just picked up and ripped the Firefly blu-ray set, and really want the extra features to show up like they do for movies.
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Did you already try the LocalTVExtras.bundle plugin? It works fine if you want to use it to show extras at your show level, but you can’t add them at season or episode level 
You can add them… but most Plex clients won’t show them.
(which again doesn’t really help)
New to all of this. But DAMN, why hasn’t Plex fixed this already? I see how far this goes back, and it boggles the mind. Surely the purpose of the Plex Pass is to pay cover implemented changes like this - ones that people are actually requesting?
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Yeah, came her looking for this as I’m almost done ripping Season 10 of Friends (shut up, it’s a good show!) and up until now I had been skipping the blooper reel on each season. I finally decided to give it a shot hoping that if I named it “blooper reel” it would just show up. Of course it didn’t so I turned to google. Came across this REALLY old page and I’m dumb founded that this hasn’t been addressed yet. I mean, how hard can this really be to implement? Especially if they are already doing it for movies?
Well I guess I might follow what other people suggested and make a whole new video category for “TV Extras”, then manually organize stuff in there. But I know that’s going to be a pain and messy. Oh well. Probably my only option seeing as how old this request is. It will probably never happen.
So, recognizing that it looks like this is literally never going to be fixed, I figured I’d still go ahead and put my thoughts here.
Ideally what I’d like to see is the ability to add ‘Extras’ folders both under a series and under individual seasons of a series. The main series Extras folder could contain any bonus material that’s non-season specific. This would contain featurettes, interviews, etc. that don’t depend on specific episodes or seasons and could be named with basic titles, ignoring the ‘Show Name - S01E01 - Episode Title’ naming convention and simply displaying them with the filename given. I haven’t seen many shows where further categorization should be necessary here, there simply aren’t that many generic extras in my experience, but if that’s desired it should be easy enough to port over the logic used for handling and organizing local extras for movies and apply it to these series-wide Extras folders.
From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of TV extras fall into one of three categories: Commentaries, deleted/extended scenes, and gag reels. This is where the season Extras folders would come into play. Commentaries are already handled thanks to the audio track selection menu (though it would be nice if Plex did a little better job surfacing the existence of these.) For things like deleted scenes you could associate them with specific episodes by naming them ‘Show Name - S01E01 - Episode Title - Deleted Scenes.’ For combined deleted scenes or full season gag reels, name them ‘Show Name - S01E00 - Gag Reel.’ These would all be displayed in an Extras section, either under the episodes row or as an additional “episode” at either the beginning or end of the episodes row. In addition, any episode specific extras would be displayed on that episode’s page and, preferably, on the post-play screen for the episode so it would be easy to play the deleted scenes or anything else for an episode you just watched.
Anyway, these are my suggestions and I think they’d handle everything but extreme edge cases. As I said, it’s pretty apparent the folks at Plex don’t care and none of this is likely ever going to happen, but I figured I’d throw it out there anyway and see what people think. Curious to know how others feel and if there’s anything I missed.
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What I did was label the extras as “S0E01.Title”, “S0E02.Title”, etc (“Title” would be gag reel, deleted scenes, etc). This puts them into a separate category called “Specials” and it appears before Season 1 in your seasons list. If you have multiple extras for a specific season, like multiple gag reels, you can label them with the same name and add “Part 1”, “Part 2”, etc. at the end. This will combine them and play them in order as one file. Unfortunately, Plex does not usually recognize the “Title” and just labels it as “Episode #” so you will have to go into the web browser and rename the file in there, but at least this way your file and what Plex displays will match.
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Wow. I love Plex but really? Please add this feature! I have sooooo many TV shows ripped and want to add the extra content but theres no way? How can such a wonderful app drop the ball here?
It doesnt have to be fancy, it doesnt have to be perfect. Even a way just to add an EXTRAS Folder and put everything there that would show up as a season-like option would be better than what we have now, which is nothing… Please. . . Thanks!!
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been a plex users for years and am constantly checking this thread to see if there’s finally been an update! would love to hear from the devs if there’s a reason why this hasn’t been implemented yet, if it’s something that they’re going to do eventually, but i mean five years of asking is a lot! thought i’d add myself to the list of people who want this.
There is a workaround for this already. You can’t have a folder named “Extras” because I think Plex ignores it. & the sorting ignores the folders anyway. But if you make a folder named “Season 101 - Behind The Scenes” & name the episodes “Doctor Who S101E01 - Interview With The Celery” it will make a “Season 101”, which will appear at the end where specials belong, not before like Plex thinks they belong.
Next Step:
There was a user who posted a link to his blog about “Renaming Seasons” he gives instructions on adding a Java Script bookmark that’ll let you rename seasons… (Google “Plex Rename Season” & you should find it, if you can’t send me a PM & I’ll give you the info)… You Rename Season 101 to “Behind The Scenes” & you’re all set. then make Season 102 “Outtakes” & 103 “Cast Interviews” or whater, in the order you prefer them watched in.
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thanks for your response. the workaround is definitely helpful, but it would be really nice to have it be a feature native to the app, specific either to individual seasons or the series as a whole. clearly a lot of people here want it and the workaround is a step in the right direction. it is confusing why it can’t just be added.
I get what you’re saying, but I think a big part of the problem is that TheTVDB doesn’t handle Special Features very well, when at all. Special Features always go in Season 0 so if you click on the show & click play it plays specials 1st, very annoying, but that’s a RESULT in Plex, & Plex doesn’t really have much control over that. Since TV Series “Special Features” like those aren’t allowed on TheTVDB at all for Plex to add this feature would require a Metadata Source that supports it.
Now I really wish Plex would add back the ability to edit Season names without a workaround, but that’s not even close to the worst thing they’ve taken away from us. I mean just in the last year I think they took away the ability to chose a Server directory (We used to be able to) which is especially useful if you want all users to have the same server (Which, again SHOULD be a feature, I mean that SHOULD be the default, I mean who in their right mind would EVER want a different server for each user logged in?) or have a large server & don’t want it on the system drive. For this one I think the Workaround does everything we could get with the Metadata Sources as they are now, I wouldn’t vote for it. Though I WOULD vote for a [Edit Season Names] option for sure
so the last thing i’ll say on this is that it shouldn’t matter what’s in TheTVDB. I spent a lot of time creating new “seasons” of Twin Peaks for special features and then having to rename all of the files to start with numbers so they would be recognized as episodes (1,2,3,etc). on my hard drive i now have folders labeled “season x” instead of “featurettes” or “interviews” so I don’t know what’s in them until i open them. i had to go onto the plex server and rename each “episode” one by one because the names of the files don’t carry over. then i use the special script for the plex server that you linked to in order to rename the “seasons” as “interviews,” “featurettes,” etc. this is all very time consuming.
when organizing my movies, i create a folder that says “featurettes” and put my special features in there. when i open the movie in plex, there’s a whole section on the menu screen for special features which keeps all of my original file names. it doesn’t have to coordinate with The TVDB, it’s directly just reading my hard drive. i don’t know why this feature hasn’t been ported over to tv shows already.
So you can name folders “features” or “behind the scenes” if you’d like, just not “Extras” that is automatically ignored. I personally label my folders “Season 101 - Deleted Scenes” but that’s for personal organization.
As far as numbering the episodes, that’s the very basic of naming conventions for ANY service. So you’re not going to ever get that changed. I’ve been trying to get incremental numbering {S01E4.5} (which most things support, like janky Kodi, just not Plex) for awhile & posts about it usually end up disappearing. Plex likes it’s numbering, I think MOSTLY because it lines up with TVDB that way (Who also aggressively refuses to allow incremental numbering even when it’s the OFFICIAL numbering & you can provide evidence from the original network & the show’s official page… I digress…) But TheTVDB has a huge control over how plex handles things.
Anyway… if you want the folder to be named just “Interviews” you just have to include the seasons numbering on the episodes (Plex standard naming anyway) So it’d be “Plex\TV\John’s Great Adventures (1984)\Interviews\JGA S101E03 - Interview With John’s Wife.nq4”
It IS a lot of manual work if you want to do things outside of the standards. Trust me, I know. I name episode 4.5 S01E104.5 & then have episode 5 as 105, etc, etc. So I can keep them in proper order instead of having them in the stupid “Specials” where they don’t play in the right order. I have to manually name & date a lot. But once it’s done it’s done.
If you want to preserve the file names just set it to match the show with “Personal Media Shows” in the {Match} or {Rematch}. BUT I personally think that’s more work, because nothing is going to be named as anything other than what’s in the file name, ID3 tags or folder. I also care about the dates & those are more time consuming. It also won’t sync with Trakt & is just harder to manage in general. I personally will click the {Get Info} & copy the filename then edit it & paste. Then I’m only doing the work for my extra or off-named stuff.
I would vote for an option to set seasons for “Personal Media” without doing the whole show. I’d also recommend checking out the alternative Series Scanners, like BABS S-BABS, etc, which have other ways of scanning the files & matching them, but I think their focus is more better support for anime. They have an option for putting a text file in a season folder & having it match that season with a different entry in TVDB & stuff like that. You can also get other Medadata agents, but, again, those are mainly focused (to my knowledge) on Anime because TheTVDB handles anime horribly
i appreciate your response, i’m just not sure we’re on the same page here. 
my point is that when you organize movies, if you have a folder labeled “featurettes” or “interviews” within the folder of the movie on your hard drive, the special features will show up on the menu screen with no fuss. you do not have to add numbers or any special naming conventions to the files themselves. this does not happen with tv shows. when you make a folder called “featurettes” or “interviews” or “deleted scenes,” you can place it within the show’s main folder or in the individual season’s folder, no matter what you do, the content simply does not show up on the landing page for that show or anywhere within plex.
yes, there are workarounds which you have listed which are very helpful and mostly achieve the desired effect, however they are very time consuming and require a complete reorganization and renaming of files designed to “trick” the system into recognizing the special features content as episodes. it would be great if the programmers could make organizing extras in tv shows as easy as organizing extras in movies.
The difference with movies though is that movies are… stop me if I’m wrong… different from TV Shows.
For Plex if there’s a movie folder & you have just about any video file in that folder Plex says “Hey, this must be a different version of that movie” so it’s easy to have folders in that movie’s folder & Plex can recognize them as specials, Things that only get played if a user selects them from the menu & CHOOSES to play them. Then after they play the user expects Plex to return to the Menu.
TV Shows aren’t like that. There’s a LOT more that goes into TV Shows. “What order do these go in?”, “After this plays, what plays next?”, “After this set ends, what plays next?”. Plex historically had a hard time handling folders properly in TV Shows, I assume it’s gotten better, but I don’t actually know because I use, more or less, the Plex Official Naming Structure. For that to work Plex pretty much ignores the Folders unless it can’t find the information from the file. This makes MY organization easier because I can use the naming system to my advantage. Shows like Dragonball, that have many “Arcs” within a season I can have separated so that I have “Season 1.1 - Saiyan Arc” & “Season 1.2 - Namek Arc” & still have them organized properly within Plex. After the scanner has determined what the Files are it THEN has to send it to the Metadata Agent to determine how to label it. We have enough issues with Plex trying to guess that make it harder to manage things. Like my earlier example of the Incremental Episodes. Plex sees S01E07 & It assumes everything else is an Ear Elephant & puts it as another version of Episode 7. What you want is for Plex to automatically detect if the folder has a key word telling it to treat something differently, this is going to cause problems. What words are triggers? How are those triggers handled? Plex has a big limitation in that its Scanner’s word is final, you cannot manually adjust it. Which I see the benefits of, even if I don’t like it. If, say, you use this series of words to identify a folder to be ignored as a regular season & someone in another language uses that word or something that get’s recognized as it, & they end up having a Season that they cannot have as a regular season. That creates a problem that they have to do a lot more to get around. I have a series that I have to do something like that for already. The Show is called 3x3 Eyes. No matter what I do it assumes every file labeled 3x3 Eyes S01E02, or whatever as Season 3, Episode 3 of the show. So I have to have the files named Three x Three Eyes. This is horrible & pisses me off. Sure those are more rare occurrences, but what you are suggesting will create much more problems that will inconvenience a lot more people. So would it be better to make it harder on a bunch of people, have more code error problems with the conditional qualifications, make scans take longer, to add something that would help the few, in a way that can pretty much be done already, just not conveniently, & inconvenience many?
At one point Plex moderators supplied links to how TV extras from a ripped DVD should be handled. Those links no longer work and lead to deleted pages. What is their recommendation now?
This page suggests that Local Media Assets are an option for TV shows. Either my installation is corrupted or that page is incorrect:
Just a note, Movies aren’t perfect either, there’s lost of issues with those. You have to have those folders named properly, if you have special features that aren’t Behind The Scenes, Deleted Scenes, Featurettes, Interviews, Scenes, Shorts, or Trailers they have to go in a nondescript Other folder. And you have less control over them. Me personally, I wish movies’ specials could be manually ordered. If you have Behind The Scenes stuff, for MOST people those are not gonna be the most watched special features, but they come 1st. you always have to scroll past them to get to the Shorts which are at the end. It’s not like they are in folders that you choose to look through, But TV Shows you can, it just requires a bit of work to organize it how you want. But I’d much rather have a Behind The Scenes" folder that I can skip past 98% of the time with a single click if I want to get to the Shorts instead of having to either not automatically include ANY extras EXCEPT trailers for the WHOLE library, or scroll through a bunch of stuff you might watch once. & if you are manually adding stuff forget about it, You can include ONLY the stuff you’re going to watch the most, or scroll 50 times past the stuff you’ll rarely watch. Then, heaven forbid, you want to remove something you’ve already added. Delete the files & it still shows, you just can’t watch it. Rename it, nope, it just says “can’t find the file” To rename a special feature you have to remove the whole movie, clean library bundles, empty trash, rename the files before you re-add the movie, the re-customize any artwork, & stuff. Have Bloopers one of the most watched special features behind Deleted | Alternative Scenes nope, no category for those, they have to just be labeled Other. I’d much prefer the ability to number them & have them in the order I choose instead of all manually added interviews being displayed alphabetically so if Zooey Deschanel is the lead actress her interview will be the last interview.
Sorry, I don’t generally do the extras in movies because I find them inconvenient to manage & I just tried because of this conversation & a movie I was adding had an Unaired TV Pilot, A couple Shorts, a Blooper Reel, & a 5-part Side Story shorts (that shouldn’t be grouped haphazardly with the Shorts) & I remembered why TV Show specials are easier to deal with
I too would like to see this featured implemented for TV Shows, so that the extras can be grouped with the season they’re for, and not just added as extra episodes (my current workaround).
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