Best Practices for File Names - Multi Segment Episodes

[elkfrankie]

I'm trying to add various cartoon series to my Jellyfin library. Many cartoons are/were broadcast with an episode consisting of 2-3 individual segments.

It seems most metadata providers count each segment as an individual episode.

I've seen that I can name a file with the format S01E01-E03 to indicate the file contains the episodes/segments 1 to 3.

Problem is sometimes older segments got broadcast again in a later episode.

For example in the original broadcast of the show Dexter's Laboratory, the segment "Dexter's Rival" was included in both broadcast episode 3 and episode 12. Naming files with an episode range can't properly account for this and everything I've tried end ups mangling the metadata.

Most suggestions I've found online suggest splitting the files. But I'd rather avoid that because then some of the segments are going to loose their opening and closing titles.

How is the best way to handle this?

[theguymadmax]

Look to see if a metadata provider has it has an alternative viewing order. For example: https://www.thetvdb.com/series/dexters-l...lternate/1

If this matches the order you want, you can use the TVDB plugin as your source and adjust the display order in the show's metadata to match.

[elkfrankie]

That seems to be working. I've added the TVDB plugin, and using the Joined order gives matching metadata.

[usjello]

Yeah, that’s always tricky with older cartoons — I usually keep the full broadcast episodes as-is and just manually edit the metadata to list all included segments. It keeps everything tidy without having to split the files.