[VasVadum]

I named my specials as part of each season because they are specific to each season. I assume that your system doesn't put specials where they belong and instead places them in a special's group that refuses to play them when they were meant to be played. In the case of Doctor Who, this is bad, because the specials are important and need to be played exactly when they were meant to as they contain his transformations from one doctor to the next. I have no idea why they are qualified as specials when they should just be part of the season in the first place. My assumptions come from reading the info about naming files here;

https://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/Episodes

I ignored this and decided to just go to the "videos" section instead of "tv shows", to load files direct from their file names. When I try to play Season 4's MKV files that aren't part of the season, E.G. S4E00.mkv, it plays as an audio file only. I can't force it to play video. I tried the next episode. Same thing. All the episodes in this season are doing the same thing. I don't understand what's going on or how to force Kodi to play the Video portion. There's no options in the drop down to "play as video" or "convert entry to video" or anything like that.

So, if I were to name my files to the naming algorithm requirements, would they be placed in their proper seasons or are they just gonna be jumbled into a specials folder and get ignored chronologically?

Is there a way to force play an MKV file as video if its for some reason seeing audio only?

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Strangely... VLC takes like a full minute to load the episode.. I was just about to post this when I discovered that fact..
Video Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)
Video Frame rate: 23.976216
Audio Codec: DTS Audio (dts )

I've checked the log, and it shows Kodi only attempts to play audio.
Opens the file, creates Input Stream, creates Demuxer, opens Stream 0 and finds audio codec, the rest of the lines indicate it focuses only on audio. Doesn't even attempt to search for video. Shows no errors related to video. Only shows an unrelated error later when I've stopped the file as it tries to load information for a different file in the same folder. It does mention during the log that my hardware doesn't support AE_FMT_FLOAT, and that it tried a different format. Dunno if thats related. Your documents tell me not to post snipplets so I just described instead as I didn't want to go filtering through my log for personal information to try and post all of it. I frequently have to reset the network device in the settings because LibreElec doesn't know how to reconnect and I dunno if that puts any information in the logs.

[Karellen]

I've checked the log, and it shows Kodi only attempts to play audio.

Post the log to Kodi Paste Site and provide the link. Make sure you enabled debug mode when you created it, otherwise it is useless.

I named my specials as part of each season because they are specific to each season.

No problems doing this and I do it also. I rarely have a Specials section as I fit the episodes into the standard seasons where they belong.
But you need to do this correctly or it does not work.
Have a read of "Reorganise Episodes" here... https://kodi.wiki/view/Convert_movie_to_episode

[VasVadum]

I don't know if debug mode is on. Nothing in the area of the log that revolves around playing the file shows whats wrong. Its a 500KB log, I'll have to examine it for private information before I can post the full thing, unless in this case you're fine with partial log starting at the initial loading of the file and ending after the file has been closed and returned back to the menu. However I'm almost positive at this point its the audio codec because its the only files I've come across so far that use this odd DTS audio codec and these files are the only ones that my computer can't even load fast and its an i9 5GHz with SSDs which means something's going on with the files. Someone probably encoded it wrong and I may just have to run my laptop hot for a few days to re-encode them or something.

As per the NFO editing, I really don't like the idea of having to go in and do a bunch of trickery to make things do what they should do. I would have thought Kodi would have been designed to know how to handle such situations and stuff. Most often specials are related to a specific area in a series, it would make no sense to have them in just a "specials folder" as if extras that are not related. The only extras that should do that are bonus content like interviews with the cast and such. I guess the only TV series I've seen specials be required parts of the series is Doctor Who though. There's like a special or two in all of the 10 seasons.
-- Edit; I'm a very UI oriented person. I rely on a UI to help me with things and hope that these UIs can accomplish what I need without me having to get all technical and everything. Getting into the technical bits like file editing and such causes me headaches very easily as I get overwhelmed by things I don't know well very fast.

Editing those files seems very complicated, the second portion of keeping it as a special while adding the season/episode number seems like the best method honestly. But again, I'd have to do a whole lot of fiddling with stuff I don't know much about to get it to work. Maybe I'll give it a try once I reinstall the OS. I can't stand LibreElec, a half baked OS. Need to install something else so I can install Kodi on that. Maybe Ubuntu.

[Karellen]

I rely on a UI to help me with things and hope that these UIs can accomplish what I need without me having to get all technical and everything

Well, you are out of luck.
Kodi does not create the metadata you see in your library. That is scraped from 3rt party sites like TheMovieDB and TheTVDB and TV Maze. If you have problems with the way they organise their episodes, take it up with them, otherwise you will need to do a bit of fiddling to get what you want.

[izprtxqkft]

-- Edit; I'm a very UI oriented person. I rely on a UI to help me with things and hope that these UIs can accomplish what I need without me having to get all technical and everything. Getting into the technical bits like file editing and such causes me headaches very easily as I get overwhelmed by things I don't know well very fast.

a raspberry pi running Linux may not have been the best choice for this end goal
and kodi itself lends itself more so to technical people, always has

[VasVadum]

a raspberry pi running Linux may not have been the best choice for this end goal

Right now its running LibreElec, which was what people told me to use for Kodi in the first place. However it turned out to be terrible as the OS is barely functional and a portion of my problems are the OS's fault. It seems Ubuntu exists for the Pi, so I'll try that as its something I used in the past and may be familiar enough to use it, then just install Kodi on it along with the other things I had planned. Hopefully Ubuntu can solve some of my other problems too, as I know Ubuntu is perfectly fine with NTFS file systems since I can't currently convert my drive.

Kodi does not create the metadata you see in your library. That is scraped from 3rt party sites like TheMovieDB and TheTVDB and TV Maze.

I meant that I had hoped Kodi would have some UI elements in there that might allow more novice users to do things via the interface. Options and such to manually place things in a list or whatever. In the case of movies, you're able to browse from a list of all matching titles and select the one that matches. However in episodes, you can't. It just says not found, there's no ability to manually select from a list of episodes that exist and haven't yet already been assigned elsewhere in the series. Might be a nice thing to add to Kodi at some point.

Audio Codec: DTS Audio (dts )

As per my original post. I believe the answer to my own issue is this. Its some sort of intensive codec that I don't think Kodi is able to figure out too well. Its odd that the audio codec would disable the video feed. Thats the only thing different from all the other episodes that work right. This season is so intensive that even my computer has problems trying to load it, spending a full minute just processing it to start no matter how fast the drive and processor are. I'll just have to find a way to re-encode these.

Have a read of "Reorganise Episodes" here... Convert_movie_to_episode (wiki)

I'll keep this bookmarked, and try this later once I've exchanged the OS for one that isn't so useless.

[DarrenHill]

Right now its running LibreElec, which was what people told me to use for Kodi in the first place. However it turned out to be terrible as the OS is barely functional and a portion of my problems are the OS's fault. It seems Ubuntu exists for the Pi, so I'll try that as its something I used in the past and may be familiar enough to use it, then just install Kodi on it along with the other things I had planned. Hopefully Ubuntu can solve some of my other problems too, as I know Ubuntu is perfectly fine with NTFS file systems since I can't currently convert my drive.

LibreElec is deliberately designed to be "just enough OS for Kodi" (as per it's tagline). So won't be a good fit if you're looking to do stuff at the OS level, although it does have docker support which can be an option in some cases too.

Aside from that you have OSMC, which has much more OS underneath it, or as you say either Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian as-was) which can both run Kodi as an app within a full OS environment.
I have a Pi5 running Ubuntu and it works fine for what I need it for there.

[VasVadum]

I wanted to update this with some new information I found.

I had the same issue again but this time with more regular codecs. I found out why though. It appears that, somehow, my episodes are corrupted in such a way the only app in the world that appears to be able to play them is VLC on mobile and PC. It takes it a good minute to process the video to begin playing too. These videos appear to be tagged as "truncated", cut short? However the files play completely and entirely unbroken once VLC spends that whole minute processing them. I don't quite understand it, nor can I find a way to fix the video files and I'm not sure exactly what VLC does to fix them in playback either.