[BETA] New Plex TV Series Scanner

[tramp78]

The Beatles/
Season 01/
S01E01 - A Hard Day’s Night - I Want To Hold Your Hand (09-25-65)
S01E02 - Do You Want to Know A Secret - If I Fell (10-02-65)
S01E03 - Please Mr Postman - Devil in Her Heart (10-09-65)"
S01E04 - Not a Second Time - Slow Down (10-16-65)

etc. All three seasons are names the same

On the Incredible Hilk, it actually filed it under Incredible Hilk. LOL

On snafu, it couldn’t go here?
https://thetvdb.com/series/private-snafu

Same with Looney Tunes. Old scanner pulled from THETVDB and got these covers
https://thetvdb.com/series/looney-tunes

But the new scanner grabbed The Looney Tunes Show (TV Series 2011-2013) — The Movie Database (TMDb)

Is there a preferred source to get names now? I used ot get most TV Series from THETVDB.

[anon5074910]

I was hoping over time this would fix itself but alas has not. The new DC show Superman & Lois is coming into plex with the wrong title Superman and Lois.

I believe the issue is that titles are coming from IMDB and for this show its wrong, see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11192306.

TMDB and TVDB both have this title correct.
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/95057-superman-lois
https://thetvdb.com/series/superman-and-lois

Is there a way to resolve this or do we have to edit the show title in plex itself ?

[exT613]

@drzoidberg33

Yes, there can be a slight lag when the episode metadata is very new on TVDB. PMS will run a refresh every night (or whenever you have your scheduled tasks set for) for new items so it’ll automatically pick up the metadata when it’s available without you having to do anything.

Date based episode matching still isn’t working 3 days later. It appears to be broken.

[drzoidberg33]

Thanks for letting me know. I can see for some reason we still only have episodes up to March 4th on this particular show. I’ve reported the problem and will keep you updated.

[adriana]

@anquieta

The agent does not respect the poster marked primary on TMDB. It seems to prefer the second one listed, instead of the first and primary, for some reason. It doesn’t seem to look at resolution either. When none are marked primary, it seems to pick the highest resolution one, but that can be a newer poster specific to a season. Not sure how to algorithmically determine this…

We prefer the poster from TMDB that has the highest vote count. In the case of Shameless for example our selected poster has 8 votes and a vote average of 5.52 whereas the primary poster that TMDB is displaying has 2 votes and an average of 5.384. We’ve found that using the vote averages generally works better than using the primary image.

@anquieta

Is it possible to have an option to use TVDB for series posters? Do not have this issue with the TVDB agent. TVDB data seems to be better for series posters. (Also for season posters, which are not just scans of DVD/Bluray covers… but that’s a different matter)

No it’s not possible to have an option to pick the source for posters but I will look into our poster preferences for TV shows and if it turns out that TVDB does generally have better images we might end up adjusting our scoring mechanism in favor of those images.

[anquieta]

Thanks @adriana. I see. That’s also logical.

I do find my library is tidier sticking with the TVDB data, particularly with posters. But also noticed some quirks on episode names and descriptions that are really inconsistent by episode (such as for 60 Minutes). It looks sloppy, when in the past people have remarked at how high quality and polished the metadata in Plex is.

I know a lot of this is due to underlying data quality in TMDB, but my testing of the beta Plex TV agent so far shows that it relies too much on TMDB data, which may make sense in the long-term given business changes, but right now data quality suffers. It will likely take a couple years for folks to improve TMDB TV data and get it as good as their movie data. I’ve contributed changes based on my testing.

I’m going to switch back to the TVDB agent since I just don’t have time to do more series matching (for some reason, some English series got matched Russian ones), poster changing (as discussed), and manual clean up of titles and descriptions (per above). Plex definitely has the right goal and intent with the beta Plex TV scanner – to pull the best data from multiple sources, make manual clean up less for users, etc. – but for me, it looks like “more sources” is really just TMDB from what I can tell and manual clean up went from from zero to quite a bit. Perhaps just the nature of a beta.

[zackotronic]

I have some episodes that I have embedded data in them (because of custom episode ordering, etc). But the embedded data from the mp4 files are not being picked up by Plex. I’ve tried to do the Plex dance with the files, but no matter what I do, it will not read the embedded data.

[drzoidberg33]

Which metadata fields are you using?

You should just make sure of the following:

1. The files are mp4/m4v/mov. We don’t read embedded tags from any other files.
2. In the Advanced library options you have enabled “Prefer local metadata” and that you refresh the item metadata after making this change.
3. For episodes we read Title, Summary, Content Rating and people tags (e.g. writers, directors, actors).

[adriana]

@mrbrax

They have Swedish titles/descriptions on TVDB but it’s probably picking up the TMDB entries instead?

Translations from TVDB are not supported yet, we’re still working on those. Right now we only support translations from TMDB.

@boessi

@drzoidberg33 any plans to add TVDb Alternate Ordering (aka Netflix)?

Yes we’re thinking about adding those but I can’t give you a timeline.

@anon5074910

Is there a way to resolve this or do we have to edit the show title in plex itself ?

You need to edit the show title in Plex

[DarkKnight]

Plex tries to detect intros when I add new media even though I don’t have plex pass. Only restarting plex server stop this.

[drzoidberg33]

Thanks, I’m pushing a fix for this

[zackotronic]

i have done just this but it will still not read the metadata. I have refreshed my library metadata multiple times. But for some reason it won’t read the embedded tags.

[drzoidberg33]

Yup, that should work.

Could you refresh metadata for one of these episodes then grab your logs and send them to me?

Setting → Troubleshooting → Download Logs.

[agneev]

@anon5074910

Once you do either 1 or 2 then unmatch the show, clean bundles and match it again which should then pull the title correctly.

That would remove play/date added history for the entire series?

[zackotronic]

here are my logs.
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-03-12_20-14-56.zip (2.8 MB)

[moe2046]

So should refreshing metadata to get the new agent to work preserve custom metadata? Just looked at all my Star Trek shows, Atlantis, Chuck, Community. That 70s Show etc where all the show titles and descriptions that I entered have gone, but for some bizarre it seems to still see the title in the sort field.

Should these automatically lock after I edit them or do I need to do something else? This time I am putting everything into Word docs for each show so I can easily copy past in future.

[emb531]

Any update on this fix?

[t2smith]

Observations when using Plex TV Series (BETA) as my agent.

The Movie Database isn’t setup for most theatrical shorts like The Three Stooges or Tom and Jerry.

Using TheTVDB for episode ordering works for Tom and Jerry but will not name The Three Stooges episodes. The Three Stooges only works properly with the agent set to TheTVDB.

For the rest of my TV shows, I didn’t notice much difference between using The Movie Database or TheTVDB for episode ordering except I got worse season posters for the Dukes of Hazzard with The Movie Database.

Season descriptions were pretty much nonexistent except for The Wonder Years and those were very short like “The second season of The Wonder Years aired on ABC from November 30, 1988 to May 16, 1989.”

My main feedback would be to make it where you can change the episode ordering and/or agent for individual series that don’t work well with the library defaults.

[Insomnic_1]

@t2smith

My main feedback would be to make it where you can change the episode ordering and/or agent for individual series that don’t work well with the library defaults.

This is doable. I did this for Firefly to use TVDB (DVD) order while my library default is TMDB. It’s in the “advanced” area in the edit screen of the series.

[t2smith]

Thanks. I was clicking the three dots instead of the advanced area of the edit screen. Unfortunately, I can’t change the agent this way. The Stooges episode titles only get named the episode number and there is no description no matter what I use for the episode ordering unless I change the agent to TheTVDB.