2024-11-10, 09:18 AM
(2024-11-10, 03:42 AM)theguymadmax Wrote: The closest thing to what your looking for can be accomplished with missing episode fetcher with the TVDB plugin you can use the "Missing Episode Fetcher" feature with the TVDB plugin. Here's how to set it up:
1. Install the TheTVDB plugin from the catalog, then restart the server.
2. In the Dashboard, go to My Plugins, select TheTVDB, and make sure the "Include Missing Specials" option is checked.
3. In your Library, enable the "Missing Episode Fetcher" feature.
4. Scan Library - scan for new and updated files.
5. On the homepage of the web UI, click your user profile icon in the top right corner and select Display.
6. Enable the "Display Missing Episodes Within Seasons" option, then click Save.
Your library will now show all episodes marked as **"Missing"** for each series. They will include titles and episode numbers in the metadata, but this is only from TheTVDB.
This is the only thing that's even close to a solution. It still doesn't actually give episode numbers very conveniently, you need to go into the ... dropdown and hit "edit metadata" in order to see the episode number for each individual episode, but since Jellyfin naturally orders things in ascending order you can assume that the first item listed is Ep1 and from there it seems to work well enough. (though not perfectly, I did notice some ordering weirdness that made them not add up quite right, but it was an easy enough fix)
With that said, it's really insane that this isn't a builtin feature if Jellyfin exclusively relies on episode numbers like this. The episode number prescribed to these specials is going to be completely arbitrary and I even went out of my way to check various metadata sources and they don't even seem to follow this episode-naming schema that jellyfin is using at all. (on things like Anisearch or AniDB some OVAs aren't even included in the same series as the main show, sometimes the seasons are each entirely different listings but all have the exact same title, etc.) I completely understand that it'd be basically impossible to come up with an algorithm to reliably figure out which episode is which for you automatically, but you should not have to use some third party plugin and then mentally count to figure out which episode number is associated with which special. The bar to solving this problem is literally just being able to hit a button and then have a plain-text list of "episode ### - Title" so that users can figure out how to name their files so that Jellyfin can identify them properly. (even then ambiguously titled specials might be a problem, but there isn't really anything Jellyfin or anyone else can do about that)
Without this single plugin I genuinely don't know how I would have even been able to go about figuring this out, especially since (as mentioned) you can't even reliably go to your metadata sources themselves in order to figure out what "episode" the various specials are. I'm generally super leniant when it comes to most FOSS software (most of the time it's just a matter of taking 10 minutes and learning how to do it) but I genuinely don't even know how I would go about doing this if not for this specific plugin. This isn't even a quality of life thing where it just makes it easier, I legitimately can't think of a reliable way of finding these associations if even the websites for the metadata sources themselves can't tell you. The only thing I could possibly imagine would be literally brute-force naming them incrementally and seeing what episodes show up within jellyfin but even that can be shakey since if Jellyfin can't find associated metadata it'll use the file's title, embedded information, etc. to add it to the folder. If the only thing Jellyfin goes by is Season/Episode number pairings then not telling the user which episode number is associated with which special seems like a massive problem. It's asking the user to just magically know the completely random number assigned to each special from nothing. (which, again, I couldn't even figure out what episode number they were when I was directly referencing my metadata sources!) Do most users just straight up not use the specials feature of jellyfin or something? I honestly don't get how most people even go about adding specials if the only way to add them is to assign them an episode number, but only a very specific episode number, oh and by the way we won't tell you what that number is, oh and you can't find it out by going directly to your metadata sources either. I'm not even mad just genuinely confused, how is this just, not a problem? The only way to use a core feature of Jellyfin is to know information that you aren't told and can't find out, unless you use one very specific plugin and even then it's not completely intuitive and requires quite a lot of unnecessary manual grunt work. This isn't even a matter of "it would be so easy to just add a button to show which episode numbers have which titles!" (though, it should be relatively easy feature-wise. If all Jellyfin needs in order to get metadata info is an episode number then a basic while loop that scrapes from episode 1 to episode N where N is the first episode without any valid metadata, then show a basic text popup that tells the user which episode returned which title, year, etc. It'd obviously take a couple of hours to implement well at least, but relative to other features it'd be incredibly simple) I just legitimately cannot understand how people use (or are expected to use) this feature when they aren't told information that they need to know in order to be able to. It feels like if the only way Jellyfin would allow you to scrape special metadata it prompted you for a randomly generated password to unlock metadata-scraping for specials and then just never told you what the password was.