What is the procedure to get things on the Plex library corrected. Specifically, the entire structure of Animaniacs is out of whack and missing several episodes/segments.
Plex uses metadata from (by default) TMDB, but you can also choose TVDB. Animaniacs I noticed for myself, is quite annoying. Most likely because the source of your copy of the show is one that somebody ripped from a DVD box set. DVD box sets are notorious for having changed episode numbers, or simply leaving entire episodes out.
If your source has the episodes numbered based on original air date, then you need not do anything. Aired Date is the default numbering system used by Plex, but TVDB provides for two alternate episode numbering systems Absolute (not recommended) and DVD. Go to the Animaniacs TVDB page and look at the DVD ordering, to see if it matches.
If it does, then in Plex go to your Animaniacs show. Click the Pencil icon, and click advaned. Change the Episode Ordering drop-down to pick what you need (TheTVDB (DVD)?), and click Save Changes.
DVD is correct, however, there is a problem. Because there are mulitple sketches in 1 show, they show 2 different sketches as “S03E01” for example. How can the files be numbered to show up correctly in the library?
Are your files splitting those episodes? Usually if the two episodes are so closely tied to eachother they are in one file. Then it’d make sense that they are all “S03E01”.
This is a bizarre way to number it on TMDB though. I’m not sure which episode Plex is supposed to pull metadata if you name a file “S03E01” for example…
I can split them if I want to. I have the option to rip the dvds either as a full episode or as chapters, which equates to the individual segments.
But yes, saying that plex doesn’t know what to grab is precisely what I’m driving at. How is it supposed to know?
As a standby for now sorting by absolute order will solve this problem.
However, if you’re at all familiar with Animaniacs, you know that any episode is a combination of several individual segements that vary in length. There are some segments that are very short eith some having a run time of less than a minute: Randy Beaman, Good Idea, Bad Idea and The Wheel of Morality are key examples. These aren’t listed on TVDB at all and if I’m going with Plex and by extension TVDB, to consume it then those segments get missed entirely.
I’ve submitted a ticket pointing out these issues. If nothing else their information about the specific segments is wrong. It has every single segment listed as a 25 minute duration, which is obviously false. Not holding my breath but maybe I’ll get lucky and get it resolved and they’ll sort by full episodes instead of individual segments.
I guess I want to know if you care about listing ALL the segments in a particular episode in Plex. They don’t seem that important to include in episode descriptions, since both TVDB and TMDB metadata providers don’t care to list them. Animaniacs might be one hell of a difficult show to try to nail down a “definitive” episode ordering. But you can choose to over-ride whatever Plex does yourself. It may take a long time, but you can change all details of an episode yourself with the title, poster image, description (including adding in sketch titles).
I hope a dev can chime in with info on how - exactly - Plex picks episode numbers here where a metadata provider lists multiple episodes per number. Again, that is really odd to me, I have not seen this happen on such a scale before.
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