TV Series DVD Special Features / Extras (Behind The Scenes, Interviews, Trailers etc..)

I voted and waiting for PLEX team to add this features.
I don’t know why they ignore this suggestion for about 5years.
I’m sick of waiting…
Using other plugins doesn’t work perfectly.
PLEX! I beg you!!!

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I don’t think they are ignoring it. There’s just not a good way to do it. Every suggestion on here has some problems, most some pretty major ones. If we can Think Tank & brainstorm a solution that’s really good it’ll have a much better chance. With only 300 votes it’s not a priority for the Devs to be working on

What is the problem with doing it like they do on the Movie side?

Because they are completely different. Aside from that, the movie extras have a lot of problems themselves.
On top of that, the major problem, is that the sorting system is based on TheTVdb.com. There is a system for extras. It’s just a stupid one. & it’s limited.
The Series Scanner also does a lot more work than the Movie Scanner does. The Movie Scanner looks for a video file, then looks at the folder it’s in for a Name (YEAR). If it doesn’t find one it looks at the file itself for a Name (YEAR). Before special features were added that was it. The Series Scanner looks at the folder in the root directory only, you can’t embed series into subfolders the way you can movies because that would make it do exponentially more work. It looks at the folder & names the series. If there’s a year it marks the year. It then looks at the files in that folder with the qualification that they belong to the system established for the series. It looks for a combination of numbers to interpret as a season & episode. If it can’t find those it looks for a number to indicate it’s episode number. If it finds none it determines it is not part of the series & ignores that file. If it finds an episode number but not a season it will look at the folder it’s in, if it’s not in the root of the series folder, & looks at the name of the folder for a season number. If it finds none it determines it to be season 1. The whole system is based on numbering. You need to have numbers for it to work. & the amount of information that may be included in the episode name could pretty much kill any idea of having a tag in the name to determine that it is an extra, the way movies do.
Folder-based is more likely, but still runs into the number problem. You want specials for season 1, episode 6? Well, how are you going to make it a special of that episode? Label it with the episode number? That causes problems with the scanner determining it’s an episode initially.
I suggested using a number system to sort them, & potentially having season 201(202,203) be automatically sorted as special features for the particular season (201 for season 1, 202 for season 2) but that was harshly rejected by people in this forum. The general desire is to not have to label stuff, have it not be numbered & just use the name as the title & the folder or EndTag as the sorting. Now, Plex specifically does not pay attention to text in series. It ignores the show names, episode titles, everything. That’s the way it is designed. Now there are alternative scanners. Absolute Series Scanner for instance will read the names & if there is no episode number will use the name as the name of the episode & it sorts them into Season 500. But there are other issues that it has. Aside from that the Scanner app is like 20 times bigger than the Plex Series Scanner having significantly more code, doing a lot more work, & having a lot more places for there to be errors.

I think if they just required you to use folders for TV extras inside the season folder that would simplify the scanner system. Any video file inside one of the dedicated folder names like “Featurettes” would be seen an extra no matter what name it had. Visually they would also display below all the episodes for each season.

If for some reason there was an extra feature that covered all seasons their only option would be to put it inside one of the seasons or create the Specials folder (Season 00) and put the extras folders inside that.

I’m curious as to why you think this. I have 30 or more movies with extra features and don’t recall ever having trouble with them. I have them all inside sub folders though. I guess it’s possible having them all together in the parent folder with the movie file could be where the problems crop up.

I generally have them in folders too. But sometimes Plex won’t recognize them unless I put them in the root folder. Other times it does fine. I’ve had this problem with multiple libraries on multiple servers. I tried for a while to find some consistency but I eventually gave up because I didn’t find it worth it.

There’s also the problem that sometimes if you add extras it won’t get the online extras.
Then there’s the problem that sometimes whether in a folder or with a tag it won’t include the extra unless you change the name, again I couldn’t find any rhyme or reason for when it does & doesn’t.
Then there’s the issue of not being able to rename the extras. If the name is wrong & you edit it Plex still includes the extra under the old name, shows it in the list, but if you click it it won’t play. Then if you remove it sometimes it still won’t go away. Other times it does. Then if you try re-adding it sometimes it won’t show up, sometimes it does. Sometimes it adds it back, but with the old title, even after Plex dancing, & won’t play it because it points to the old file name. Sometimes it adds thd special feature as a Special feature, but also shows it in the Play Version list. Again, this has been done on multiple libraries on multiple servers with windows & NAS Linux systems.
Then when things DO get added they system just sucks. It’s a scroll list under the movie that is only “categorized” by having a different word under the title. & Trailers are 1st, then Behind The Scenes leaving the most used special features, Deleted Scenes & Shorts at the end of the list. You have the option to only include extras that are trailers or everything. I personally could do without the Behind The Scenes but I’d rather have them, just at the end. Ideally they should be grouped into category as a menu, not just titled into categories. I personally think it’s the most poorly thought out & implemented feature Plex has added. I don’t think anyone actually likes the way it is, people have just gotten used to it because it is better than nothing. & it is definitely an improvement over the previous system, of no system at all. But it’s not something to try to emulate elsewhere. While I think it has merit for the per-episode extras from an interface perspective, I just don’t see a way to make it get to where the interface matters because there is not, as of yet, any real proposed way to do it

An example of my most recent annoyance with this

All included as different versions of the movie, not as special features. I eventually got it to work & they are now special features, but that was a lot of work, a ½ dozen dances, a dozen restarts, until I finally had it like this

With the files & folders named the same

My Plex Server is running on a QNAP NAS. I wonder if that could be the difference in why I’ve not seen the kind of problems you describe.

Although I did have a renaming problem once, like you described, but the Plex dance fixed that. Definitely not a show stopper bug.

I agree that it would be nice to have a better interface on the extras. Maybe a way to enter a dedicated screen just for the extras, in addition to the scroll row.

I generally consider the “making of” featurette to be the most important for me. I’ve gotten into the habit of numbering my extras in the order I want and sometimes putting everything under Featurettes to make sure it stays that way. But it’s better to have them accessible even if things are unsorted as opposed to not in the interface at all.

That’s one of the biggest reasons I think the solution was poorly executed, nobody likes how it works, the categories are in no way categories.

I have servers on Windows, on Asustor NAS, on ZyXEL NAS, on an Ubuntu Linux Server, & I’ve had those issues on like 1 in 10 movies with extras. Now I only have like 300 movies & less than half have special features, but I’ve pretty conclusively determined it’s a problem with the scanner & how it handles things. It has definitely gotten a little bit better, but it’s still problematic enough for me to refer to it as “Hinky” & “Imperfect”

I just ran into this. I started ripping all my DVD and going though The Simpsons now. I hit S4 and each DVD has 3-5 extras on it. I don’t know what to do with them. I want to keep them. For the time being I’m putting then into Simpsons/Season XX/Extras/Disk XX/file.mkv. Plex doesn’t even see the files but at least I have them saved and sorted for the time being so I can go back and do something with them later.

If I rename the Extras folder to Specials and don’t include the Disk XX folder then Plex sees the files but dumps them all into Season 1 which is completely wrong.

I don’t know why we can’t put them into the Season XX folder with a naming something like SIMPSONS - S04D01E01.mkv Where it’s Season04 Disk01 Extra01. I’m perfectly fine with entering the metadata manually if needed.

The naming convention for the Series Scanner is that after S is the season, after E is the episode number. There is no D so it skips over that. It’s not about the Metadata, it’s about the scanner, before Metadata, that determines how to sort. You can keep your folder names, but the 2 levels of nesting may give you problems. I’d recommend making a folder Season 4 - Extras & put in it all the season 4 extras. If you want plex to ignore it until a better solution comes around add a .plexignore file in the folder. If you to have them show up in plex name them “S304, S305, etc” using whatever hundred you like, they’ll show up after all the seasons, but if they are labeled Season 204 you at least know they belong to season 4. I personally will use different hundreds for different things. Like a show that has “break the 4th wall shorts” will be 101,102,103 for the seasons while behind the scenes stuff will be 801,802,803. There’s also a script you can use in a browser on a computer to allow you to change the display name if you want them to look pretty

In just 2 months we gathered 100+ votes! (including mine)

For me, I’ve created a sub directory labeled ‘extras’ and put the ‘extras’ files in there until this much needed feature can get resolved.

+1, a must have for many show releases nowadays!
Just got the Office US complete series on BD and would love to have an easy way to add the deleted scenes that each episode has easily.

Just added my vote. Just got all my Game of Thrones 4k extras organized only to realize they won’t show up in Plex. How come the Movies naming convention wasn’t ported to TV Show extras? :frowning:

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Because they are completely different animals. They work in completely different ways. & I’ve said this a lot, the movie extras have enough problems on their own, the Series Scanner is like 5× as complex, meaning those issues would be exponentially greater.
Essentially what you are saying is “Birds can fly, so why not dogs?”

Complex doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Advocating for no change just makes you sound like you’ve already invested too much time and energy into your current workaround for this functionality to be useful to you.

It makes sense to have this feature for both movies and TV shows, otherwise it’s inconsistent. Not sure what the typically amount of votes is required for a suggestion to get shortlisted, but 436 doesn’t sound like a lot over 3+ years :-/

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I was never saying it’s not possible. But the idea of “Do it like the movies” doesn’t make sense. It CAN’T work the same way the movies work, so people saying it should already be done because the movies have it is useless. Obviously the ideas like that are, well, obvious. If it could be made to work that way we’d already have it. I personally can’t really think of a really good way to do it. Every way that’s been suggested isn’t great, it’s just better than what is. Half would probably cause as many problems as they solve.

Who’s advertising for no change? Definitely not me. BUT I’d rather wait a year for a better feature than get a crappier feature tomorrow.

It’s not so much about “We’ll work on this once there are enough votes” rather it’s a "we’ll look through the forums & if someone sees an idea they like they’ll work on incorporating it. The more votes it has the more encouragement they have to find some way to make it work, & the more suggestions they have to work with

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I think it primarily hinges on the “idea they like” part of that decision making. Otherwise more of the 5+ year old top-voted ideas would be implemented already like audio books, playback speed, or server to client messages that shouldn’t be technically challenging but maybe time consuming to provide the level of fit and finish expected.

It’s nice though that 2-factor authentication finally made it this year.

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Of course, that’s why I try to brainstorm different ways because someone might see it & say “Hey, I like that, I want to work on that”