The “When Calls the Heart” TV show is shot as multiple two part episodes, so when the DVD sets are sold they are released in two versions. For example, season 5 is sold as a “Season 5” episode set with 10 individual episodes and a “Year 5” set where the double episodes are combined into 5 movies.
Has anyone figure out how to name them or is there a database that has this information listed separately?
Plex matches against TheTVDB.com, so try their naming convention first (Season 5 / 10 episodes).
https://www.thetvdb.com/series/when-calls-the-heart
Plex is picky with TV shows, so best to follow the recommended structure:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200220687-naming-series-season-based-tv-shows/
@FordGuy61 - Maybe you missed what I was saying. The “Year 5” DVD set doesn’t match up to the 10 episode season. Instead it has 6x 2 hour movies so if you set them up to match the TVDB it looks like you are missing half the season, and in fact the Christmas movie disc has a different name than the TV movie special.
It almost needs a completely separate database entry to make it look right. Unless I’m missing some trick.
Thanks for the clarification.
Do they keep the order correct, combining episode 1 & 2 into one file, episode 3 & 4 into another, etc?
If so, you could try multi-episode naming: When Calls the Heart - s05e01-e02.ext
The specials go in Season 0: When Calls the Heart - s0e3 - The Christmas Wishing Tree.ext
Make them combined episodes in Plex? Name them something like “When Calls The Heart - s05e01e02”, etc… Then Plex will show that you have each episode of the season.
Combined episodes will successfully fill out the season, but I wonder how confusing that will be to the people watching it. If they play the first episode then the second and realize it’s the second is same as the first.
Or does Plex help the user skip over the “watched” second episode somehow?
Plex shows them as individual episodes.
Unfortunately, in my experience Plex does not skip over those episodes automatically. But it does display them. When I come across them while watching, I just back out and mark it as watched, and move onto the next one.
Plex keeps track of which episodes are played/unplayed and also duration for partially played episodes.
For Gilligan’s Island, if I click on episode 5, Plex plays that episode, even though episode 5 is in the middle of the physical file on my server. It also keeps track of progress just as if the episode was an individual file.
After playing episode 5, Plex proceeds to episode 6, whether or not it is marked as played. However, Plex does this even if episodes are in individual files.
Note that I’m testing this with Plex Web and Plex Media Player. Other clients may behave differently.
You can always split the files into individual episodes. Many TV shows in multi-episode format have chapter markers to denote individual episodes, which makes it easy to pick the location when dividing such files.
Edit: The example in the below forum post shows splitting based on timecodes. You can also pick Before chapters from the pull-down menu for Split mode. The enter All in the Chapter numbers box.
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