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How do I re-order a multi-season TV series to match DVD (or other) order?


ShoutingMan
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ShoutingMan

How do I re-order a multi-season TV series to match its DVD or other non-aired ordering?

 

I know how to re-order a single season like Firefly: lock metadata, then manually edit Season and Episode numbers. That doesn't work for multiple seasons.

 

I'm trying to get Futurama into either theTVDB's or Wikipedia's (which uses The Infosphere's) ordering. The problem is that a TV-season contains episodes spanning two, three, maybe four DVD-seasons. Altering editing the metadata season and episode values, there are unexpected side effects.

 

You get a new mixture of the episodes with their revised ordering but in their original season. And then you get the re-ordered episodes for that season.

 

Here's two images to illustrate:

Futurama S1: Everything's ok here. There are four episodes pulled in from season 2 to complete season 1. The ordering looks good.

post-136972-0-46160300-1490616367_thumb.jpg

 

Futurama S2: The multi-season side effects appear. The four episodes originally in Season 2 that were revised to be in Season 1, appear with their S1 metadata in the beginning of S2. And then the correctly revised S2 list follows.

 

Let jump to 

Futurama S4: Now the season listing is preceded with 9 episodes from the aired Season 3 that were revised to fall into other Seasons. 

post-136972-0-13721300-1490616580_thumb.jpg

 

Season 5 is especially screwy since "Season 5" according to the Wikipedia ordering are the Made-for-TV movies, which are filenamed and stored in Season 00 (Specials) to conform to theTVDB listing to try and get metadata.

 

 

What metadata do I need to edit and how do I edit it to force Emby to conform to the desired season listing? I'm open to revising NFO files, video filenames, etc. I accept that Emby doesn't support DVD-ordering automatically. And it doesn't have the Reordering Agent that Plex does. But I'm looking for a solution and willing to try the manual editing, if necessary.

 

Thanks! :)

post-136972-0-58072800-1490616375_thumb.jpg

Edited by ShoutingMan
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We'd like to support DVD order in the future. In the meantime you'd need to handle this all on your own probably by adjusting season and episode numbers.

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ShoutingMan

We'd like to support DVD order in the future. In the meantime you'd need to handle this all on your own probably by adjusting season and episode numbers.

 

Yes. I'm hoping someone can explain how it's done. Simply changing metadata in the server web-app doesn't work.

 

There are some threads on the topic, but none have details:

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/40812-tv-episode-thumb-not-loading-from-nfo/

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/12025-american-dad-overriding-season-numbers/

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/7065-set-dvd-vs-aired-sort-order-for-tv-shows/

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  • Solution
ShoutingMan
  1. Setup library with all media
  2. Use favorite tool, like theRenamer, to embed titles into filenames.
  3. Scan library and force metadata updates (including images) to get all the NFO files and Thumbnails downloaded
  4. Backup Series, just in case
  5. Quit Emby Server
  6. Methodically rename all files to match desired Season - Episode numbering. Change filenames of NFO and Thumbnail files to match
  7. Edit all NFO files (in text editor of choice) to set filepath reference to Thumbnail and Season and Episode values match revised numbering
  8. Restart Emby Server
  9. Scan Library
  10. Confirm changes are correct in Metdata Manager
  11. Check in Emby Theater (or preferred client)
  12. Lock Series in Metadata Manager

 

Likely problems:

If an NFO file gets missed or is otherwise wrong, Emby will download additional metadata according to the NFO file and populate the metadata manager with this erroneous data. If you leave Emby Server running while editing filenames, this will assuredly happen, and it's a mess. Shut down Server. Then fix the problematic NFO files. Clean database and re-scan. This should fix everything.

 

I had some problems with Season 5 of Futurama, specifically the Specials. It brought the other Specials. I don't know why. The four main "movies" (which are four episodes each) are correct. I deleted the extraneous specials and will try again later to see if I can get them back into Season 00 as expected.

 

It's a tedious, ~4 hr task, to manually edit about 8 seasons of names and metadata. But it's straight forward if you want to do it.

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ShoutingMan

I see an opportunity for someone to write a simple e.g. Python script to automate this. I think it would have to do this:

  1. Parse NFO file and read DVD Order season and episode
  2. Rewrite NFO file with revised values in the season, episode, and thumbnail keys
  3. Rename the NFO file and corresponding video and thumbnail files
  4. Iterate over all files / folders

For one skilled in the art, this doesn't seem too hard.

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  • 3 months later...
hasown

Sorry to resurrect an old topic, but does anyone know how renaming episodes with the above procedure would behave with the trakt plugin? My suspicion is that it would scrobble the wrong episodes.

 

Using Futurama as an example, trakt only has 9 episodes for the first season, but if I renamed the episodes to use the proper DVD order season 1 would have 13 episodes. Not sure what trakt would do there.

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ShoutingMan

Sorry to resurrect an old topic, but does anyone know how renaming episodes with the above procedure would behave with the trakt plugin? My suspicion is that it would scrobble the wrong episodes.

 

Using Futurama as an example, trakt only has 9 episodes for the first season, but if I renamed the episodes to use the proper DVD order season 1 would have 13 episodes. Not sure what trakt would do there.

I use the trakt plug-in. For some reason it doesn't see my Futurama collection. But my Firefly collection is there. In Emby i manually edited to be the canonical order. In trakt, it's the aired order. And trakt only shows the four specials, not showing all the specials I've added into my collection.

 

Trakt is clearly getting show, season, episode values from Emby and using its own source of metadata.

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  • 3 years later...
muletail

"Methodically rename all files to match desired Season - Episode numbering. Change filenames of NFO and Thumbnail files to match"..

facepalm...

 

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