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I’m running into some confusion with how to properly name TV show extras.
I have hundreds of extras organized like this example:
Season 0/
Star Trek The Next Generation - s00e201 - 1988 Reading Rainbow Segment With Levar Burton.mp4
As described at the bottom of this support article – Naming and Organizing Your TV Show Files | Plex Support – The above convention should display that file as an episode in “Specials” with the title “1988 Reading Rainbow Segment With Levar Burton”. Instead it’s displaying as “Episode 201”.
Both the Scanner and Agent in my TV Shows library is using “Plex TV Series”. What am I doing wrong?
I don’t have much experience with TV shows in Plex, but the one variance I see from the Help page you linked is that the folder name should be Season 00, not Season 0. Try that?
This should indeed add the episode as a Special – though unless there’s online metadata for episode s00e201 or your file has embedded metadata (and the library being configured to use/prefer that embedded metadata), Plex will only display its title as Episode 201. The arbitrary text after the sXXeYY schema is completely ignored by Plex – this is mostly due to users placing all kind of “technical terms” there that’ll not make sense to Plex.
While Specials are usually actual episodes that aired outside the regular season order, Extras are on an entirely different page. Same as with movies, local extras usually cover featurettes, deleted scenes, interviews…
With the introduction of the Plex Series agent you can have local extras for all tiers of a tv show:
on the show level
on the season level
on the episode level
That being said… not all Plex apps are able to actually display local extras on all levels (all do for shows, Apple TV shows extras for episodes, iOS/Android mobile display all tiers)
There is metadata in the title. But every video file I have in my TV Shows library has metadata in the title that MakeMKV appears to embed automatically with its original file name, e.g “title_t01.mkv”. It appears “prefer local metadata” takes priority over matching so even if I were to enable that setting and manually add each title for specials I have to now compensate and remove them for everything else. Like literally everything that is not a special feature in the library. Maybe I’ll try clearing cache or doing the “Plex dance”.
Plex doesn’t read metadata from mkv files – just mp4, m4v and mov IIRC.
Personally I try to reserve Specials for actual specials and use that kind of interviews and behind the scenes materials as local Extras.
Example:
TV Shows <- the folder linked to a tv-show library
Star Trek The Next Generation
Featurettes
Reading Rainbow Segment with Levar Burton (1988).ext
Season 01
Star Trek The Next Generation - s01e01.ext
...
Where .ext is a placeholder for your actual file extension.
In the above example, Plex will add a local extra of type Featurette named Reading Rainbow Segment with Levar Burton (1988) to the show level. By moving the Featurettes folder into one of the Season XX folders, the extra will be added to that season (though it’ll currently only be displayed on that tier using iOS/Android mobile).
So, I actually am serving up mp4’s with the embedded title tag – Handbrake must preserve it upon conversion from the mkv source – or Handbrake puts it there. Regardless, it’s an mp4 with an embedded title tag.
My problem actually surfaced itself when I renumbered the special features. Previously everything was working fine – the special features were using the embedded title tag and the regular seasons were matching with the TV agent. I did not have the “prefer local metadata” setting enabled.
Still doing detective work to find out what happened. I just read the announcement for handling special features in TV series in a similar way to Movies. Maybe there’s a regression with the introduction of this feature.
RE: NOT all specials are listed on TVDB – Which is why I started renumbering them e.g. s00e101 since there are existing entries for s00e01 and s00e02 on TVDB.
Yes, I could run every mp4 through mp3tag to remove the embedded title tags except for the specials. I’d probably opt just to edit the specials’ titles directly in the web player before doing this though.
According to the support article on naming TV specials though, the title should be applied as the optional info segment of the filename? That’s what I’m still not clear on – why this behavior is not demonstrated.
I may have been conflating the terms Extras and Specials in my posts. I am using Specials (Season 0) and “Show Name - S00E01 - Episode Title.ext” is the format I’m using. Instead of “Episode Title” displaying I see “Episode 1” in the case of the example. According to the support article I should see “Episode Title” as the title correct?
Okay. That is what I was misunderstanding – I think before I was relying on the tags and somehow only the specials season was using them and not the regular seasons.
Bit it appears the new updates for adding local files to tv series is what I’ll be making use of. Much easier. Thanks.
