I am very new to Plex and apologize if I’m just being ignorant of something obvious, but I’m having most of my extra material from one particular TVShow show up as individual movies, yet all of my movies don’t show up at all.
The issue is with Smallville series copied from the DVD set and has all sorts of extra material.
I have the shows named as follows:
Plex/Library/TV Shows/Smallville/Season 1/SMALLVILLE Season 1 Disc 1/Smallville - S01E01 - Pilot.mkv
I then have the extra material in separate folders under each disc with titles as follows:
Smallville Season 02 Disc 03 - Extras/Smallville S00E01 - Additional Scenes.mkv
My Movies are under the Movies folder and labeled as:
Hunger Games/The Hunger Games/The Hunger Games (2012).mkv
I have dozens of similarly labeled movies, but nothing shows under movies (or anywhere else).
TV Show Extra Material: TV Shows/Smallville/Specials/Smallville - S00E03 - Additional Scenes.mkv
Episode 1 and 2 are used, per TheTVDB. Use other episode numbers for the extra material you wish to include.
Is there any way to have the Specials associated with each season and episode or do I have to put them all together? If I put them all into one folder, with as many of the extra files as there are, I will have total chaos and have to carefully rename many dozens of files to be able to tell which episode they go with.
Thanks for the input. I’m working to see if this will fix my problems. I’ll let you know if it works.
There is no official way to have Specials for each season. There is just one Specials folder.
One workaround is to give them fake episode numbers, such as s01e100. This would let you put them in the desired season folder.
Another workaround is to use something like Season 101 for the specials from season 1, 102 for season 2, etc. Just make sure you don’t use “real” season numbers (00 to 10 for Smallville).
Note that the extras, no matter how you organize them, will only show up with episode numbers, not names. For example, if you have Smallville - s101e03 - Additional Scenes.mkv, it will be listed as “Episode 3,” not “Additional Scenes.”
Plex matches against TheTVDB. If it cannot find a match, it just lists the episode number. Plex also ignores everything past the SxxEyy, so it does not matter if you include the episode name, extra name, etc. in the file name.
Thanks for the input. It looks like I have a daunting task to collect & name all of the video files. I was hoping it would be easier. I have been using MakeMKV to rip the disks and when possible used FileBot, but most of the files require careful analysis and renaming just to get FileBot to work with it to finish the task. So much of the data on the dvds is useless junk and I don’t have a good means of separating them without opening and looking at each file to see if it is part of some on disk game, or actually extra scenes or interviews, etc. I have somewhere between 750 and a 1000 movies to bring onto the server. A noticeable bunch of the titles are not common and will likely not have data on them in the usual databases. I have ripped about 200 in so far and it is a ROYAL PAIN!!!
I believe I found the problem with my files - I had the Plex library pointer still going to my first attempt and somehow didn’t update that, so it wouldn’t fix anything regardless of what I did.
On a Movie DVD/Bluray, the movie will be the largest file and will have chapters.
On a TV DVD/Bluray, the shows are almost always the largest file. Also, if there is more than one show per disc, they’re easy to spot, as they’ll always have similar size, duration, etc.
Regarding extras, play the disc (or ISO image) using VLC etc. Go into the extras/special features section. See which ones you want, play them, and note the duration of each segment. FYI, sometimes “Play All” is a separate file on the disc. Sometimes it plays the segments individually. It varies by disc.
Now open the disc in MakeMKV and look at the files on the disc. You can generally tell which extra is which based on duration. Sometimes they’re within a couple seconds of each other, so you have to pull both. However, you can cut down on having to look at every file.
Also, if you’re working on a Windows PC, set the folder type to videos. When you open the folder it will show duration times for each file. Makes it very easy to sort by duration. Right click on folder → Properties → Customize → Optimize folder for videos.
