Sort title not working as expected

[ThomasPdt 4]

Hi,

I have two special episodes which are both placed in the Specials folder directly under the series folder:
- \The Office US (2005)\Specials\S00E04 - Webisodes - Blackmail.mkv -> whose title I changed in Emby to "Webisodes - Blackmail"
- \The Office US (2005)\Specials\S00E251 - Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant.mkv -> whose title I changed in Emby to "Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant"

S00E04 has an entry on TVDB: https://thetvdb.com/series/the-office-us/episodes/1718361.
For both of these episodes, I set "Airs during season" to 5.
When inside season 5 on Emby, I would expect to see first S00E04 followed by "Webisodes - Blackmail" followed by "Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant" in alphabetical order.
However, as you can see in my screenshot "listing_in_emby.jpg", it's the other way around.
I think I might have found the cause.
1. I moved the file "S00E04 - Webisodes - Blackmail.mkv" out of the series folder.
2. I rescanned the library.
3. I renamed the file to "S00300 - Webisodes - Blackmail.mkv".
4. I moved the file back to the Specials folder.
5. I rescanned the library.
6. Once Emby found it, I renamed the title to "Webisodes - Blackmail.mkv" as before.
7. Now it is sorted correctly.
8. I think it's linked to the episode having an entry on TVDB. So I test this by adding manually the TVDB ID in the episode's metadata.
9. I rescan the library and refresh the metadata.
10. Indeed, the sort order is messed up again and it's not alphabetical anymore as was shown in the listing screenshot.

My questions now are:
1. Could an admin try to reproduce this on their side to confirm the cause or, if they know already that is the case, confirm it anyway?
2. If that is indeed because it has an entry in TVDB, could you please fix this so we can sort titles regardless of having to be in TVDB or not? Or is it by design, and if so, for which reason?

Thank you in advance.
 

[Luke 42078]

Hi, try adding Airs before episode number. Episodes of a season don't sort using sort title. That would only be used if you were actually sorting them by name in some other context.

They sort based on season and episode number, and then by date.

[brothom 177]

One other way is to change the sort title to be "prefixed" by a numeric value. Sorting by string (text) is working as intended in this case because the shorter title is sorted before the longer one. Maybe try setting the sort title to this:

4 - Webisodes - Blackmail
251 - Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant

4 is ALWAYS less than 251, regardless of if the sorting is numeric or alpha. A more structural way would be to just keep using the naming convention for your sort titles:

S00E004 - Webisodes - Blackmail
S00E251 - Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant

The same rule applies here too, 4 is always less than 251.

[ThomasPdt 4]

6 hours ago, brothom said:

One other way is to change the sort title to be "prefixed" by a numeric value. Sorting by string (text) is working as intended in this case because the shorter title is sorted before the longer one. Maybe try setting the sort title to this:

4 - Webisodes - Blackmail
251 - Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant

4 is ALWAYS less than 251, regardless of if the sorting is numeric or alpha. A more structural way would be to just keep using the naming convention for your sort titles:

S00E004 - Webisodes - Blackmail
S00E251 - Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant

The same rule applies here too, 4 is always less than 251.

Thanks for the help.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work because as Luke said, episodes of a season (as recognized by TVDB) are not sorted by alphabetical order, only by episode number.

[ThomasPdt 4]

19 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, try adding Airs before episode number. Episodes of a season don't sort using sort title. That would only be used if you were actually sorting them by name in some other context.

They sort based on season and episode number, and then by date.

Hi, indeed this helps me re-organize my specials the way I wanted. Thanks for the tip.

Another solution I had found was to rename the file from S00E04 to something like S00E300 (with a number that doesn't exist on TVDB) so that Emby wouldn't recognize it and therefore treat it as a normal special. Of course, this means you'd lose metadata info from TVDB (such as the description), but you could manually copy this from TVDB.

[brothom 177]

10 hours ago, ThomasPdt said:

Hi, indeed this helps me re-organize my specials the way I wanted. Thanks for the tip.

Another solution I had found was to rename the file from S00E04 to something like S00E300 (with a number that doesn't exist on TVDB) so that Emby wouldn't recognize it and therefore treat it as a normal special. Of course, this means you'd lose metadata info from TVDB (such as the description), but you could manually copy this from TVDB.

Yeah using imaginary numbers isn't really the way. I think a more "permanent" solution would be to use more zeros in your filenames. 
This should keep files nice and sorted but still keep the real season/episode numbers:

S00E0004 - Webisodes - Blackmail
S00E0251 - Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant
S05E0011 - Scott's Tots
S09E0002 - Roy's Wedding

From a "sorting" point of view, these can now all be equally sorted. This is because theirs lengths (literal length in characters) is the same and there are no dots or spaces in the way.
The system will still treat the above as:

Season 0 - Episode 4
Season 0 - Episode 254
Season 5 - Episode 11
Season 9 - Episode 2 

You might not even need to go into the thousands on your episode number, the Office is done now right? So if there isn't going to be a thousand episodes within a single season of a show, this formatting should be enough:

S00E004 - Webisodes - Blackmail
S00E251 - Webisodes - Blackmail - extra - Creed's Anti-China Rant
S05E011 - Scott's Tots
S09E002 - Roy's Wedding

For normal shows (under 100 episodes per season) you can use this formatting: "S01E01 - Episode name"