Feature request: More flexible series scanner

[MoviezMcGee 2]

My Problem:

There is something that bugs me about the series scanner: You can either label a file with 1 episode number (eg. S00 E01) or with a positive range (eg. S00 E01-E03).

This is pretty handy, but sometimes I feel it is not enough. Some shows air in a weird format, so when they are recorded, the episodes are out of order. I got my episodes of SpongeBob from cable DVR, but they were aired out of order from the databases. Sometimes, episodes aren't even properly back to back. This is pretty common for cartoons. Here's some example pain points:

1. They might be in a reverse order, like  S01 E02-E01
2. They may even be out of order entirely, like  S03 E01,E05
3. Sometimes, my recording contains like 3 episodes, like S05 E02, E04, E06
4. There is a gap between episodes in the file, like S03 E01, E03

I have a couple options.

1. For case 1, I could misrepresent the actual order, but get the episode names included which makes it easier to search in Emby. For example, I can have the file actually be like S01 E02-E01, but reverse it to be S01 E01-E02. This will be a little confusing but will at least make it searchable.
2. For case 2, 3 and 4, there isn't really a solution besides picking a single episode and labeling it that, or going through the arduous task of manually editing and transcoding everything to split them into separate files. This is very time consuming, consumes a lot of power, and just sucks. If I'm recording my favorite cartoons or shows every day, I'd be spending 10x as long splitting them up into different files. It's already annoying enough naming everything based on the databases.

 

Solution:

I'd like it if the series episode scanner could be expanded to have the ability to do a custom range, perhaps separated by a comma or something, so we can have gaps in our multi-episode video files, and even have backwards ordering, etc. Basically, if it could somehow parse episode numbers arbitrarily and display them in the correct order as they are in the video file, it would make my life a lot easier and happier! I can't imagine I'm the only person to have this problem.

[ebr 16169]

Looks like its been quite a while since anyone has had this issue.

The real problem is there would be no way to play or display these in the proper order.  Why not just split them apart when this happens?

[MoviezMcGee 2]

7 hours ago, ebr said:

Looks like its been quite a while since anyone has had this issue.

The real problem is there would be no way to play or display these in the proper order.  Why not just split them apart when this happens?

Right. well, that could be a solution, but I'd have to use something like Handbrake or a video editor and that is a very involved process, especially when we're talking potentially dozens or hundreds of episodes recorded from DVR. This is a bit of an extreme example, but it would make sense to me:

Emby currently displays sequential episodes like "1-3. <episode 1 title>, <episode 2 title>, <episode 3 title>"

We could display it like this: "3, 1, 5. <episode 3 title>, <episode 1 title>, <episode 5 title>,"

And for backwards sequential order: "3-1. <episode 3 title>, <episode 2 title>, <episode 1 title>,"

 

The syntax in the file naming could be something like this:

Negative sequence: "<show title> S00 E03-E01"

Arbitrary selection: "<show title> S00 E01, E04"

And possibly combine sequences with arbitrary episodes: "<show title> S00 E01-E03, E05"

 

I suspect you haven't had many posts here about it because most people just use a workaround instead of asking. I could be wrong. This solution would need a bit more parsing logic, but I think it would work well!

[ebr 16169]

15 hours ago, MoviezMcGee said:

We could display it like this: "3, 1, 5. <episode 3 title>, <episode 1 title>, <episode 5 title>,"

Displaying the individual file isn't the issue.  The issue is how do we display multiple files when the episodes are all out of order?  And then how do we play them back in order (hint: we can't).

[rbjtech 5284]

Agree this is a non-issue that emby can't possibly be expected to resolve as even if it could identify the episodes by file name, it doesn't know when one finishes and one starts.

It takes seconds to split a file if you know the timestamps you want to split at (use mkvtoolnix etc) - you don't need to re-encode anything.

If it's TS (recorded) files, then again split is easy - use avidemux for example - again, no need to encode.

Handbrake is for encoding - so don't use that

It involves a little work agreed - but then you will have a fully metadata indexed item by episode, fully searchable etc.