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

So there is some development work being done on this as a 3rd Party thing. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I thought I’d post a link in case anyone wants to give it a go

Just note that this is in the Development channel, so it’s probably still not even to Beta level, so it may stop working or change in ways you don’t like at any time. I think someone posted about this before but looking at it now it looks like it is usable at least

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It’s at 340 ( I just added my vote ). I’ll ask around to see if anyone else I know is interested in this feature.

I was doing TV library maintenance last night and noticed I had a bunch of Season XX folders with just “Extras” subdirectory in the folder. It was because I couldn’t find a home for them at the time I created them . That has renewed my interest in this topic!

I agree it’s complicated. There are aired specials, unaired specials, unaired episodes, fan made extras, etc. It’s a lot of use cases to have to write code to handle. First, you have to know all of the use cases, then decide which ones you are going to tackle and how, and finally, do the tackling. :slight_smile:

Using TVDB is a great shortcut over having to build and manage your own TV database. On the other hand, you don’t have much control over it.

So there are reasons that the handling of these “extras” was put off for later. Give the people the main functionality first , and the nice to have’s later.

It’s good to hear that there is a TV Extras plugin in the works. I’m a big fan of allowing 3rd party plugins to fill in functionality that perhaps not everyone wants, but enough people want for the community to create a plugin for it. Now you have to decide if you want plugins to be a walled garden like the Apple App Store, or the wild wild west, or somewhere in between.

Just so you know the movie extras are completely unrelated to an external database. Their organization and apperance inside Plex is purely based on the file/folder naming.

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Exactly. & they also have no way to edit or change posters for them. If you want to rename them you have to move the entire movie, rename the file, & re-add it

That’s certainly working… but not necessary.
Refreshing metadata does the job (took me some time to learn that)

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It’s been a few months since last I’ve dealt with that, but, back then at least, a Metadata refresh did not work

Just checked it & that does work now. Awesome. Thanks for that

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In this case, I wasn’t talking about extras. Well maybe I was. I was thinking of adding and extras section to TVDB. I double it supports that.

I remember adding a TV series that was aired in 2 episodes but later released on DVD as a single movie. I tried adding it to both TVDB and TMDB and they both rejected it. If they reject that, I surmise they would reject adding a DVD/Blu-ray extras section.

On the other hand, if there was another TV database that we Plex users could manage, TV extras would be added in a hot second.

TVdb officially only supports extras that aired on broadcast TV or are labeled as a show on a streaming provider or were official web extras like shorts on official Twitter, YouTube, or official show websites.
Extras that are only available on DVDs are not supported or allowed.

The problem would be having a consistent setup. I personally like things in a way other would not, I personally don’t use the Specials season like it is on TVdb because I don’t WANT my specials that are between seasons to be skipped if binging a series. So I put them as episodes 100+ of the season & manually tag them. I’m sure the Plex community would have 1,000+ ways that different people want things

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I make a Smart Playlist for this. All episodes of the show, sorted by Year. Specials are included in order by airdate.

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Yeah, but that’s obnoxious. 1st it’s not in the library it’s in a separate category, 2nd you can’t stop part-way through & pick up again without scrolling to find your place to start, 3rd that’s a lot more work then just adding the Metadata for the episode personally, 4th not all Specials should be played in aired order, 5th sometimes I want a prequel episode to air where it belongs timeline wise, 6th if you do that for a lot of shows you have a gross Playlists collection that has no good way to navigate

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Just to be clear, I wasn’t saying that’s a bad idea, if it’s created I’ll happily contribute to it, I was just saying it’s a lot of work & cost for little benefit & I don’t see anyone doing it any time soon

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It’s not BINGING if you’re starting and stopping, geez. Pausing for bathroom and snack breaks, maybe …

:slight_smile:

It would be nice if playlists remembered your place in the queue, though.

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You can binge 5 episodes, come back later & watch an episode, then later binge another 8. It’s still binging if you don’t watch the entire series all in one go. I mean I have some series with like 200 episodes. Nobody is binging all 3+ days of that without stopping. To get the next episode from Special Features in the right order it has to be labeled as essential to shows story in TVdb, which there are plenty non-essential specials I want to watch in order, if I was only watching essential episodes I could skip a chunk of regular episodes in most shows. Then you have to go back to the On Deck between each episode. So it’s not about how many episodes you watch in a row, it’s about do you ever watch an episode from the Up Next screen.

I have playlists for each year of the Arrowverse because they crossover shows so much that it’s impossible to watch without. But each time I start & have to go & find the last show played, scroll to find the episode before that one, & start at the episode in the playlist after. Playlists remembering spots shouldn’t ever have to be a feature request, that should be a given

Yeah, this would be a really great feature to have. For now, I’ll just manually edit my specials to match, but I’d prefer not to do that.

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I am looking to set up a Plex server to serve out my DVD/Blu Ray collection. The major part of my collection is Doctor Who with all it’s associated extras and different version of stories. Reading this thread about the inability to organise extras in the places where I want to watch them is really putting me off going with Plex. But then again, I don’t know if any media server system can cope with the complexities of Doctor Who with its multitude of interviews, trailers, tardisodes, confidential, and features.

Anyhow, I have added my vote for this feature and will check out the TV Extras addon that has been mentioned a few times in this thread.

But I do hope that a fix can be found.

It’s a pain for doctor who to be sure. I ended up adding the extras to the end of each series they were realted to using different number to relate to specific feature types. E.g. 1xx alternative versions of episodes 2xx colour versions of animated episodes 3xx making of docs, 4xx other modern features 5xx archive features etc.

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this feature is badly needed

+1
This feature needs to be a thing. TVDB is a huge PIA to get anything added, not to mention they don’t allow adding DVD extras of any kind. Would love to see this added.

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Just here to say the fact that this is still not supported is ridiculous. It’s been widely requested since at least 2015.

Unfortunately, it looks like development for regular Plex features has slowed even further down in the last year or so as they focus on their own streaming content.

FWIW, I’m currently using the method of just using really high episode numbers for manually named bonus content (e.g. S02E103, S02E104), so that it’s not affected by any TVDB metadata.

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