I am interested in Plex for serving up content which is already maintained in my iTunes library, since Plex does such a great (superior) job of making that content accessible, and visually compelling. Kudos to the development team!
But I'm having some troubles, which may make my continued use of Plex a non-starter.
I've pointed Plex to my existing iTunes Media locations, and overall things work well. However, I'm encountering several problems with TV episodes which are inexplicably mis-identified. Usually this occurs when I have rips of DVD sets - where not only the episodes are available, but also DVD Extras from that same season.
Example: The Coupling, Season 1 DVD, contains 6 episodes - and 2 extras (interviews, and a photo shoot). The rips of these items are identified perfectly within iTunes and on my drive: "Season 1, Episode 1" = "Flushed" is structured within a "Coupling" folder, "Season 1" sub-folder, and named "1-01 Flushed.m4v", for example. Extras, I've given unique "episode numbers" to keep them distinct - episode "101" and "102", in this case. I have even embedded all such metadata for these items directly within the files - using Subler, in most cases.
iTunes handles this perfectly: Episodes 1-6 are shown, and the additional items ("episode 101" and "episode 102") are shown following them. Since I have included metadata, I get synopsis information, artwork, etc. perfectly when syncing these items to my iOS devices, when they are displayed via Home Sharing on Apple TV, etc.
HOWEVER, Plex seems to want to re-interpret these data, and screws up a vast majority of the time. In this case, Plex doesn't show the actual Episode 1 at all - but instead, labels the second (?) extra ("The Photo Shoot") as Episode 1 -and doesn't show the real episode 1 at all.
See screenshots of iTunes, the filesystem entries, and the Plex display of these entries. This is a common situation with most (all?) entries which have anything in addition to the actual episodes. I'd like to have all content available via Plex, but it seems to be preventing this result.
Bottom line: Why does Plex attempt to re-interpret the data which is already embedded within these files? Is there a setting I'm missing which effectively says "Don't try to pull data from the internet for these items; just trust what's already available"? Is there a way to represent such extras within a given season, which don't get in the way of correctly identifying the actual episodes?
