I'm trying to complete my collection of a show and up until maybe a year ago the season and episode # in the torrent name has been completely wrong. No idea why. For example if I'm looking for season 18 episode 17 and I find a torrent for that episode chances are pretty good the episode I download isn't actually for S18E17.

So if you make torrents and include the episode title in the torrent's name, thank you.

When the show has its episodes numbered in four different ways, all official depending on who is counting.

Sometimes the discrepancy is with release order vs. dvd order. So it could be something like that. Of you check TVDB it might list any alternate show orders for that series.

I use a tool called Rename My TV Series — and it's available for macOS and Linux as well as Windows. And it's never steered me wrong.

People do all kinds of dumb shit when naming TV series and numbering them. And for the MOST part, it doesn't matter — until you run a Plex or Jellyfin server, and then you gotta comply with TVDB's systems.

Like for example Sword Art Online fans. A very weird, very clannish bunch and they're not kind to outsiders, especially when they want to know when season 5 is coming out. Because to everyone else, Sword Art Online was the first season, Sword Art Online II was the second season, Sword Art Online Alicization was the third season, and Sword Art Online Aliciziation War of Underworld was the fourth season. Part of the confusion is, the author tweeted that they were gonna make 48 episodes of Alicization. And they did. Half of it was Alicization and the other half was Alicization War of Underworld, which was the fourth season. Each season of anime is its own production with its own name and that's how TVDB does it. Now if you're just storing the files and you're gonna open them with VLC, you can number them how you like. But if you try it through something like Plex... things break. And it's really only weird because the fans make it weird.

I was talking to one guy who misnames Demon Slayer seasons, intentionally, because he didn't think the second season should exist. So, the story with that was, Demon Slayer Mugen Train was a movie, but then they broke it up into episodes and made it the second season. This guy doesn't think that season should exist. So in his eyes, season 3 is actually season 2 and so on. And that's fine on his hard drive, but on Plex, it's gonna take those episodes listed as season 2 and it's gonna change the names to make them season 2 episodes.

There's an -arr program that handles renaming, so if you're a Linux (?) user and you use the -arrs, you should definitely use that, it should fit right into your workflow. But if you don't use the -arrs or you're on an OS that most of them don't work on (like me with my Macs), Rename My TV Series is super easy for that. And it's free. And it'll even set the file creation date/time as when the episode originally aired. So that's neat.

Mythbusters was terrible for this

Unfortunately this show hasn't had any DVD/Bluray releases as far as I know.

That is some wild stuff, though I can sort of understand the reasoning for both shows.

I love that IMDB Internet Archive has the complete collection of Mr Roger's Neighborhood, but yeah, the episode numbering didn't match any release I could find.

That was a fun hour or so with bulk file renamer, or powershell. Can't remember how exactly I fixed it.

Edit: IMDB -> Internet Archive. Where the hell was my brain when I typed that?

Thanks for posting this, love hearing some "inside baseball" about this kind of stuff and good to know there are some tools out there to help fix things.

Could also be a discrepancy between aired order and episode order. The TVDB are Nazis about this stuff and often cling to their own "method" despite it not aligning with anyone else including the show's own production team.

What shows are you having issues with?

I was talking to one guy who misnames Demon Slayer seasons, intentionally, because he didn't think the second season should exist

That is some hilariously insane behaviour

That's very helpful thank you, because I found the train thing really jarring, and it derailed the show for me. Now, I think I can go back and try again!

The First 48

Uh oh, I wonder if that's the case here.

I don't think we have a hobbydrama community on lemmy, but there is a subreddit with that name for this type of story.

Another situation is multi-episode releases. I remember first encountering this with LOST where the 2h season finale would be listed as two separate episodes, which for a season finale wasn't too annoying. More recently, later seasons of The Good Place would air two episodes at a time, and that always caused a mess as well that required manual intervention sometimes.

PTSD flashbacks to downloading The Repair Show.

And fanon is fine for custom ordering if you're just playing files in VLC. But if you're using an organiser, you're gonna have to comply whatever metadata that organiser pulls from or weird shit will happen. Pretty much just episodes being numbered with no names, no cast/crew list, generic date (1/1/1970), and an ugly thumbnail for the episode preview. Which all defeats the purpose of using the organiser. The point being, for it to look pretty on your TV or mobile device.

With Jellyfin, you can pretty much force it to go the way you want, though. Just match everything and then manually enter all the data. You can force Jellyfin. Plex on the other hand...

I never watched the second season, which I understand not only broke up the movie, but added some minor (insignificant?) scenes. Watched season 1, then the movie, then the next couple seasons. I haven't seen the latest season, or the new movie.

I've had non-anime friends see the new movie and they said they were fine with not knowing anything about Demon Slayer going in. Still, I'm not going to watch it until I see the latest season. Apparently, the movie and two others will finish the series.

Mine is NOVA where TVDB decides that some episodes are "specials" and puts them in the season 0 folder despite PBS, NOVA, and the uploader listing them as normal season episodes. Sonarr doesn't know this so they get relabled as the wrong episode which I then have to go back and fix along with every later episode typically as I'm getting to watch that specific episode.

I'm rewatching Scrubs and the order is all over the place. Dr Cox switching between long and short hair each episode, character leaving and then the next episode still in the same position as if nothing happened.

I think my Batman TAS copy is still totally out of whack.

And then you have animes with hundreds of episodes to which the concept of "seasons" doesn't apply. But depending on who you ask they still try to push the show into that format.

Its far less insane than it sounds. The movie being split up into the second season is exceptionally stupid

I think it's mostly an issue with their earlier seasons, but the show had a habit of running multiple seasons concurrently. Example - Season 8 on TheTVDB goes from Episode 1 to Episode 10, then Episode 21 to Episode 40, then picks back up with Episodes 11 through 14. Apparently they're actually two different seasons, but try telling that to the hardasses at TheTVDB.

This feels very much like a low quality public tracker issue. Even on mid tier PTs I never run into this.