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+--- Thread: TV show specials playing before show (/t-tv-show-specials-playing-before-show)
TV show specials playing before show - Lechim Koval - 2025-03-05
Hello everyone, I noticed something today and was wondering if I missed a setting somewhere, or if this is functioning as intended.
When starting a new show today, I noticed that when starting it from my media library utilizing the play button that appears over the primary cover image it resulted in playing the first special associated to that show rather than S01E01.
I tested this across my PC (Web UI), NVIDIA Shield (Jellyfin for Android TV), and Roku and it seemed to behave the same way for the following buttons.
Web UI Library
- Play button over the cover image
- Three dot menu play option
Web UI Series Overview
- Play button next to the shuffle and mark played buttons
Android TV Series Overview
- “Play next up” button
- “Play all” button
Roku
This was not found to be a problem on Roku as there is no play buttons in those locations. The Roku app instead forces you to navigate specifically to the episode you would like to play.
I utilize the “Display specials within seasons they aired in” option found in Dashboard > Libraries > Display so that I can get any filler episodes to play where they belong in the series. This works great for that. Out of curiosity when I set the first special’s “Special Episode Info” metadata to have it play elsewhere in the series, all the play buttons listed above (with the exception of the Android TV “Play all”) then start the series at the second special associated to that show.
So this leads me to believe that…
a) All specials with no “Special Episode Info” play prior to the series as intended.
b) All specials with no “Special Episode Info” play prior to the series which was not intended.
or c) I misconfigured something.
In addition I found that even if you are already part way through the series, for example S01E05 shows as the “Next Up” episode in the overview, the play buttons listed above will still start playing the specials. This may be confusing for some of my less technical users, especially for the button specifically labeled “Play Next Up” on the Android TV app.
I have found that marking all the specials as watched seems to help mitigate this but I don’t think that will be an intuitive solution for some of my users.
If someone could give me a little insight on this I’d greatly appreciate it.