How do i stop it playing specials first ahead of S01E01

[rcsnoopdog 11]

I have the same problem , how do i stop it playing specials first ahead of S01E01 

[rcsnoopdog 11]

How do i stop it playing specials first ahead of S01E01, i don' t mind if it is part of the series like a pilot but it seems to just do any ?

[Happy2Play 9780]

Potentially need to see the specials positioning data telling it when to play.

[GrimReaper 4740]

That behavior is driven by special episode metadata - if you don't want it played before/during/after any season, on special episode: Edit Metadata>clear "Airs during season" and/or "Airs before episode"

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Edited February 3, 2025 by GrimReaper
Cross-posted

[RanmaCanada 495]

You first need to make sure the specials are named properly, and then if they are you need to check when they are told to play in regards to season position. It's possible you have them merged together, which if you do, you will want to split them apart, and then rename them properly.

[Happy2Play 9780]

LOL the trifecta

[rcsnoopdog 11]

10 minutes ago, RanmaCanada said:

You first need to make sure the specials are named properly, and then if they are you need to check when they are told to play in regards to season position. It's possible you have them merged together, which if you do, you will want to split them apart, and then rename them properly.

the special in question is named \The All-New Popeye Hour\Specials\The All-New Popeye Hour - S00E02 - Popeye Rhapsody by Ilan Rechtman..mkv 

and the airs during season and airs before episode are blank just like above

[tedfroop21 86]

I should make a guide.... It's kind of easy.  You can set your specials to play in season as they were released, before, or after the season.

1.  Log in as administrator.

2. Go to the episode in question.

3. Go to the pen icon beside the episode name.  Click to open meta data.

4.  Edit Season Number and episode number.  Season 0 is the Specials season.  You can assign an episode if it wasn't named with one.

5.  Set if you want it to play during a season (Christmas Special etc.)  or not, like this one.  If you are changing these fields, make sure you click the lock icon to lock the field so it doesn't change if you rescan or update.  If it plays before the season its because you want to navigate to season 1 episode 1 to start playing the regular seasons.

Being Season 0 it comes before season 1 so it plays first.

Edited February 3, 2025 by tedfroop21

[rcsnoopdog 11]

5.  Set if you want it to play during a season (Christmas Special etc.)  or not, like this one.  If you are changing these fields, make sure you click the lock icon to lock the field so it doesn't change if you rescan or update.  If it plays before the season its because you want to navigate to season 1 episode 1 to start playing the regular seasons.

Being Season 0 it comes before season 1 so it plays first. 

If Airs during season  is blank does that mean it won't play before any season or episode ?

[rcsnoopdog 11]

19 minutes ago, tedfroop21 said:

I should make a guide.... It's kind of easy.  You can set your specials to play in season as they were released, before, or after the season.

1.  Log in as administrator.

2. Go to the episode in question.

3. Go to the pen icon beside the episode name.  Click to open meta data.

4.  Edit Season Number and episode number.  Season 0 is the Specials season.  You can assign an episode if it wasn't named with one.

5.  Set if you want it to play during a season (Christmas Special etc.)  or not, like this one.  If you are changing these fields, make sure you click the lock icon to lock the field so it doesn't change if you rescan or update.  If it plays before the season its because you want to navigate to season 1 episode 1 to start playing the regular seasons.

Being Season 0 it comes before season 1 so it plays first.

If Airs during season  is blank does that mean it won't play before any season or episode ?

[tedfroop21 86]

36 minutes ago, rcsnoopdog said:

If Airs during season  is blank does that mean it won't play before any season or episode ?

It depends how you start play.  Since specials are Season 0, if you just go to the series and hit Play without selecting anything,  the first season is season 0, and that will play first.

If you want to play from Season 1 Episode 1, you have to pick season 1, episode 1 and play.

After you start playing that show, to continue playing the series you just need to go to "Continue Watching", which I have second on the home page under My Media.   The order of things on the Home page can be set for each user by clicking on the gear on the top right, selecting App Settings, then Home Page on the left hand menu.

There you can set the order of the sections on your home page (My Media, Home Page, etc.  Under that you can set the order your Libraries are shown in the My Media section and below that you can set the default screen  that each library opens on and if you want the continue watching for movies Tv, playlists and much more etc. to show on your home screen.

All these settings are available for every user, and if you start playing as user A, it will not show in Continue Watching logged in as user B

Edited February 3, 2025 by tedfroop21

[rcsnoopdog 11]

18 minutes ago, tedfroop21 said:

It depends how you start play.  Since specials are Season 0, if you just go to the series and hit Play without selecting anything,  the first season is season 0, and that will play first.

If you want to play from Season 1 Episode 1, you have to pick season 1, episode 1 and play.

 

I want to be able to just go to the series and hit play without selecting anything and it start on season 1 . Is there no possible way to have it this way ? without deleting all the specials

[pwhodges 2012]

1 hour ago, tedfroop21 said:

It depends how you start play.  Since specials are Season 0, if you just go to the series and hit Play without selecting anything,  the first season is season 0, and that will play first.

What's your evidence for that?  I just tried on an unplayed series with specials which have no position information, and playback started with s1:e1, playing from the library screen or the series screen.

1 hour ago, rcsnoopdog said:

I want to be able to just go to the series and hit play without selecting anything and it start on season 1 . Is there no possible way to have it this way ? without deleting all the specials

That's how it works for me.

Paul

[rcsnoopdog 11]

4 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

What's your evidence for that?  I just tried on an unplayed series with specials which have no position information, and playback started with s1:e1, playing from the library screen or the series screen.

That's how it works for me.

Paul

Well at least i have hope as i have over 400 tv series & most are old cartoons and i don't fancy going through all that ,personally i never noticed it was doing this as i watch new stuff & they don't really have specials yet, but nephews told me about it. What am i doing wrong as i named all specials S00E whatever & thought people would only go there if they wanted. 

[tedfroop21 86]

37 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

What's your evidence for that?  I just tried on an unplayed series with specials which have no position information, and playback started with s1:e1, playing from the library screen or the series screen.

My mistake.....sorry....

25 minutes ago, rcsnoopdog said:

What am i doing wrong as i named all specials S00E whatever & thought people would only go there if they wanted. 

Nothing.  You just have to check  because  how things are organized by the metadata site your data came from is how it shows up in your collection.

I have thetvdb set up as first source for TV,  and sometimes the specials show up in order by their Aired date,  sometimes only as specials,  sometimes as either movies or specials (Futurama Benders Big Score is S00E02 or Movie ID 7706.)

It can be a pain in the backside but I went through mine and figured it out one series at a time.  Then made notes in a txt file in my media backup directory as to what sort order the files are in (there are 5 different sort orders for Futurama as an example), and whether the specials showed in season, or as specials or otherwise.  A bit overkill but should something go wrong and I can't recover from backup,  it saves hours figuring out which 6 of 30 specials show up in season .

 

[rcsnoopdog 11]

19 minutes ago, tedfroop21 said:

My mistake.....sorry....

Nothing.  You just have to check  because  how things are organized by the metadata site your data came from is how it shows up in your collection.

I have thetvdb set up as first source for TV,  and sometimes the specials show up in order by their Aired date,  sometimes only as specials,  sometimes as either movies or specials (Futurama Benders Big Score is S00E02 or Movie ID 7706.)

It can be a pain in the backside but I went through mine and figured it out one series at a time.  Then made notes in a txt file in my media backup directory as to what sort order the files are in (there are 5 different sort orders for Futurama as an example), and whether the specials showed in season, or as specials or otherwise.  A bit overkill but should something go wrong and I can't recover from backup,  it saves hours figuring out which 6 of 30 specials show up in season .

 

Sounds like i am deleting all specials then .

[Happy2Play 9780]

Not really sure of the issue here as I can only get special to play beforehand if they contain the specific position data.

There is no specific setting beside not using TVDB at all as they are the only ones that has the data and Emby has already changes to only getting critical scene position for specials.  But will not change existing data already written or provided from third party media managers.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

13 minutes ago, rcsnoopdog said:

Sounds like i am deleting all specials then .

Except for the very few shows, like Babylon 5, that have "specials" that actually continue the show I keep all my specials, in case I ever actually want to see them, in a totally separate library. In fact the last time I re-setup my server I forgot about that library and I have never missed it. 
For me there are few more useless things than "specials" or "trailers." 

But using Emby I find there is almost always a way to avoid the "useless" and "distracting" things. It is usually just a matter of turning the fluff off or never even loading it at all. 

Emby, fortunately, gives us the ability to have as little or as much garbage in our libraries as we desire. I use a "Low garbage" setup but i have a friend that loads every single thing even remotely related to the movies or TV shows she watches. It is a pain for me to watch anything at her place but I endure and she has not, at least yet, kicked me out for bad taste. 

I always find it amazing how differently different people use Emby. 

Thank you Emby for making it easy, as long as the instructions are followed rigorously. 

[rcsnoopdog 11]

18 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Not really sure of the issue here as I can only get special to play beforehand if they contain the specific position data.

There is no specific setting beside not using TVDB at all as they are the only ones that has the data and Emby has already changes to only getting critical scene position for specials.  But will not change existing data already written or provided from third party media managers.

Just figured it out, i have never watched these tv series as they are all cartoons & i don't know but i think somehow emby has me down as having played these tv shows through and so the specials come on when i press play from the first window without entering the tv series

because if i hit the played unplayed tick on and off a few times they start at S01E01, hope that makes sense but don't know why it thinks i played all these tv shows, but i think its working as it should , have to test a while

[rcsnoopdog 11]

Does anyone know how to mark all tv shows played and then unplayed together all at once ?

[Happy2Play 9780]

5 minutes ago, rcsnoopdog said:

Does anyone know how to mark all tv shows played and then unplayed together all at once ?

It is a pain now as you can use multi-select on the library to mark all as played but have to multi-select every item in a library to mark as unplayed.

But the recommended way would be learn to use the api and reset them that way from library id.  Will post the api call in a few minutes.

 

[pwhodges 2012]

47 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

For me there are few more useless things than "specials" or "trailers."

Agree on trailers and suchlike.

But some Japanese shows, at least, are substantially incomplete without specials.  The anime Monogatari has around 120 episodes, and the default ordering in TVBD for no discernable reason has about half of them as specials (the best order for that is "Book" order, which Emby won't yet let me select).

Paul

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

2 minutes ago, rcsnoopdog said:

Does anyone know how to mark all tv shows played and then unplayed together all at once ?

If you are at your main screen in the web interface you can click on the three dot menu of a library and select either "mark played" or "mark unplayed." Be careful using that and allow some time for it to complete as, if you have a fairly large library, it can take a fairly long time to complete. The last time i marked and entire TV library unwatched it took almost half an hour to finish. I usually do it on shows or a group of shows using multi-select. My libraries are rather large, I have a bit less than 1000 shows or 44,000 episodes so I do not really do much management at the library level.

[Happy2Play 9780]

16 minutes ago, rcsnoopdog said:

Does anyone know how to mark all tv shows played and then unplayed together all at once ?

Just need the library/parentid.

This marked the library as played

and this mark the library as unplayed.

[Happy2Play 9780]

From the UI you have context or multi-select to mark as played but not unplayed.

for Unplayed everything has to be marked as played then enter library and multi-select to get unplayed option as it only appears if everything is played.  As it will not show the option at library level anymore.