TV Show Specials naming convention confusion

General Discussions
1

Hey all! I have a quite a few Specials for a TV series - some of them are listed on TVDB, but most are local videos I’ve saved from DVD Extras, YouTube videos, etc. I’ve already named the normal seasons/episodes correctly and they show up in Plex fine.

I know everything else should be in a “Specials” folder, and https://plexapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200220707-Naming-TV-Show-Specials- says to name them based on TVDB, but https://www.thetvdb.com/?tab=seasonall&id=283468&lid=7 only lists them as Specials. So should “Extended Preview.mp4” be named as “Extended Preview - s00e01.mp4”?

If so, simple enough, but throughout each season there are the other videos not in TVDB, like -
Star.Wars.Rebels.S02.Extras.The.Lost.Commanders.mp4
Rebels Recon 3.15 Inside Trals of the Darksaber.mp4
Collider Rebels Recap S3 The Wynkahthu Job.mp4

They don’t represent “Specials” as they aren’t Season 00, the last one being in Season 03 for example. Like I said, the vast majority of videos are not in TVDB. Is there anything I can do so a Plex playlist sorts them by the season/episode convention?

This makes logical sense to me, but I’m not sure if Plex is smart enough to sort a playlist by ExxSxx loosely based on the example above -
/TV Shows
/Star Wars Rebels
/Specials
Star Wars Rebels - s02e02.1 - The Making of The Lost Commanders.mp4
Star Wars Rebels - s02e02.2 - Recap of The Lost Commanders.mp4
Star Wars Rebels - s03e03.1 - An Inside Man.mp4
/Season 02
Star Wars Rebels - s02e02 - The.Lost.Commanders.mp4
/Season 03
Star Wars Rebels - s03e03 - An Inside Man.mp4

That should logically sort a playlist numerically by s02e02, s02e02.1, s02e02.2, s03e03, then s03e03.1. Suffice to say, I’m confused. :neutral: I know I can make a gigantic playlist and manually move over 200 videos to the right order, but I’d rather not do that if a playlist can be sorted correctly.

2

The point is that it isn’t logical according to your perception (and mine).
you basically have 2 options:

  1. put the videos into the specials sequence and give them a high episode number (not yet assigned by TMDB – e.g. s00e100)
  2. do the same within the season

for both approaches you’ll end up manually editing your metadata.
There’s an age-old feature request to allow additional “local media assets” also for TV Shows (on top of specials) – with this you could have episode or season specific extras such as deleted scenes, featurettes, interviews…
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/155732/local-extras-for-tv-shows#latest (voting for it requires a Plex Pass)

3

Option 1 sounds like best route since Plex can’t figure out how to handle Specials worth a crap. Thank you!