Server Version#: 1.31.3.6868 (Plex Pass)
Not that long ago, Plex had an issue with providing reasonable Critics’ Ratings for TV shows after TVDB dropped their ratings of TV shows in favour of ratings only being available for episodes.
There was a PMS metadata fetcher bug that resulted in critics’ ratings higher than 100%.
Since PMS does not offer a decent method of editing these values for TV shows (other than the 5-star rating), it was also a thorne in my side.
Recently, I noticed that reasonable ratings are back for TV shows (obviously, fetching them from TMDB (which is fine for me, personally).
BUT - and this is a problem - not for ALL TV shows (see below for more details of my analysis).
First, let’s inform about my settings.
Here’s how my TV show libraries are configured:
Language: German
Don’t be irritated… the top-most OFDB agent does not change the default behaviour of the described problem.
Since the described problem in the recent past, I had hundreds of TV shows with ratings like “56123%” (number above 100) - and cannot properly edit these.
So I did a manual “metadata refresh” of all of these to grab the new TMDB critics ratings.
But for a few of them, these wrong critics’ ratings did not go away (while for most TV shows, the numbers changed to the TMDB ratings values).
Here are two screenshots to prove my point:
In order to find out what’s wrong, I created a list of a number of TV shows that did not change the critics rating back to a reasonable value and manually checked all the major databases to get to the root of the problem.
It turned out that there are three different problems with the way metadata is fetched currently with the old Plex agent. But first things first. Please find the following screenshot with the list of TV shows and which details I looked into (database IDs, references to other database IDs, ratings and number of people rating).
Problem #1
I found two TV shows that were listed as TV shows in IMDB as well as in TVDB, but which were created as collections with individual movies in TMDB.
Problem #2
I found two TV shows with no TMDB database entry at all.
Problem #3
All other TV shows I checked had only few (too few, obviously) number of ratings to be grabbed or used by the metadata agent.
All problems seem to be based upon the fact that either TheMovieDB rating cannot be fetched at all or that - in an attempt to control violence among deep space miners… uhh, sorry… in an attempt to prevent ratings with only a few number of ratings - TMDB rating get ignored if the number of total ratings is very low.
By itself, this is fine. But, of course, the metadata agent doesn’t just null out any existing rating value but leaves the rating untouched - which leaves those very absurd ratings >100% in the database.
While for movies, the IMDB ratings would get used/shown in case that the other rating cannot be fetched, this is not true in my scenario for TV shows.
Plus, due to the interface limitations, I cannot just edit the critics’ rating field properly for these shows.
Please decide yourself, if this is a bug, a border-case scenario, a sub-optimum behaviour… whatever. Please give me the opportunity to fix those >100% critics’ ratings to replace them with the TMDB ones (even if there are only low numbers of ratings) or IMDB if TMDB rating does not qualify as “proper”.
The following work-arounds do not qualify as solutions:
- “Use of new agent”
- “Just click on a 5- 4- or any star rating.”
- “Ignore those ratings.”
- “Plex dance for the TV shows involved” (this would result in no rating at all, which I don’t find appropriate if ratings are given by IMDB or TMDB).
- Wait for X users rating the show. Most TV shows are German ones or other non-US TV shows with only few people to rate them on TheMovieDB (this is immanent… the total number of ratings on TMDB are low compared to IMDB, for example.
Possible advanced rating grabbing/handling strategies:
- If TMDB has a collection, get the rating from the collection or from the involved movies within.
- Grab also IMDB ratings and use them if TMDB ratings do not qualify as proper.
- Let the user decide, how many votes are minimum number as far as the agent is concerned.
- Give the critics rating a proper EDIT field in Plex Web on TV show level to fix buggy entries, etc…
