3rd Party Metadata Agents

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
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I want to start a discussion and maybe some brainstorming about the future of 3rd Party Metadata Agents.

So far, the Custom Agents were loaded by Plex and integrated into the UI so that you can select them in your Library and be able to do basic tasks with them (like searching and fixing a match).

However, with the recent fireside chat and the answer that I got, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

From that answer, it looks like Plex will become “Plex only”, and everything else will have to run next to Plex. So, if you want to get Metadata from a different source like AniDB, MAL or whatever, you would have to implement a “companion app” that is installed next to Plex and that is registered and interfaces with Plex.

However, this raises some questions for me, especially in terms of usability of the User AND the developer.

For example, when metadata agents in Plex are only “for Plex Agents” anymore, how would a user be able to fix a match with a custom Metadata agent?

Since the Agent would run as a separate application, they most likely need to reimplement various functionalities themselves, which are all already in Plex. So the Developer would need to “reinvent the wheel” while the User cannot simply do basic tasks in Plex just because they want metadata from a different source and have to use a different UI that also would need to be implemented by each and every “companion app” that would exist then.

But from the sentence by @McWanke, “they also created some challenges that led to the decision to stop that approach”, this doesn’t seem to be wanted anymore.

I think the questions that I want to raise here are:

  • What level of integration will a Custom metadata Agent be able to have in Plex? I am not talking about the API access here or “getting metadata into Plex” but rather the interaction with the user.
  • Would a user be able to use the search and match features in Plex even with custom agents? Or would we need to do that on our own?
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Interesting questions.

I am also interested in these things, but @McWanke told me that they don’t have plans to publish best-practice scripts for baisc things like authentication, so I get that the community needs to put all strings together in order to find solutions for these kind of problems.

Darn, I need to get into this Webhooks thingy.

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It isn’t so much about seeing examples of how this should be implemented but rather what sort of PLAN there is for the end result, on Plex’s side.

I mean, using the API can be figured out by the Community and that isn’t really a problem with that. There are currently things about the API that don’t make sense (like having to use the old token to request a new JWT or JWK) but that isn’t really the point with the questions I have.

I am more interested in how the 3rd party agents should be used from INSIDE of Plex.

Look at it this way. Currently, you can install 3rd party agents that work directly in Plex. You can use the Match/fix match feature to change the matching when they aren’t correct, you can even search for results. All of which can be done in the Plex UI.

This means that the User can organise and fix things directly in Plex.

However, when I need to develop a companion App that only interfaces with Plex through the API, it sounds to me that I can only overwrite Data inside of plex through the API.

But this also means that I very likely don’t have any functionality to change matches INSIDE of Plex anymore for those 3rd party agents. And if that is the case, I would be required to implement features like:

  • library view
  • searching for matches
  • fix a match
  • editing specific metadata (like the title or other fields)
  • preventing updates in Plex through “locked” fields

and probably more things, all of which already exist in the Plex libraries.

So instead of having your Custom agents be part of Plex, they would just simply overwrite everything that is already in there. That is certainly a way to do it but this doesn’t really sound like the mentioned “first class citizen in PMS” to me.

I mean, it was stated that there should be something about custom agents still in 2025, that isn’t much time left really but even if it isn’t finished yet, I would expect that there is at least a plan on how this should look like. I can’t believe that something like this, would be still up in the air. I don’t really think that in 7 years, since the deprecation of plugins, no one has a plan and is just winging it.

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We’ll be talking more about custom third-party agent support pretty soon. It is still coming but you’ll just have to hang on a bit longer.

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