@james.c.andrew@gmail.com said:
Oh, and LMA is definitely at the bottom for everything I could find
and if I click Programmes I get
Personal Media Shows------TheTVDB------The Movie Database
You are aware that you must click on ‘TheTVDB’ here ?
Just making sure.
Yep, done it for everything I could find.
Well…
I figured I’d better test it. I did. I can’t get Stingray (1964) to show up in the DVD order, no matter what I do.
As I recall it was pretty easy when I did Firefly some time ago, so I named 5 episodes according to the DVD Order as shown at TVDB:
Then selected the DVD Order in the Advanced Section via an Edit:
Refreshed - just as I did when fixing Firefly…
Then promptly got ****ed at the Drive-Thru!:
No amount of refreshing metadata, Plex Dancing, Analyzing, or anything else results in anything even approaching the DVD order for this show, and I KNOW my Loco Maniacal Asshats is in the right spot and I also KNOW I have ZERO embedded metadata in those MP4 files, so I have to conclude:
and no, there’s no way I’m going to unmatch my Firefly to test where the problem is.
Short Term Solution: Use the Aired Order at TVDB (you can’t do anything else, really)
Long Term Solution: Wait for something different to happen.
BTW - I remember watching this show with great anticipation in 1964 as it originally aired and it never dawned on me how ridiculous it was to claim 600 Knots+ (underwater) was a common occurrence for this miracle of modern marine engineering, but at that time I was being promised flying cars and space exploration, so now in my old age I find out NONE OF IT HAPPENED!
The cake was a lie too.
I knew these guys were puppets ('cause I could see the strings), so it was just ‘entertainment’. I held a higher place for The Man From U.N.C.L.E 'cause that **** was REAL!
When comparing Firefly with Stingray on TheTVDB, I noticed that Stingray was missing DVD Season and Absolute Number.
I added these.
Try again in a few hours, maybe clear the cache of the TheTVDB agent before that.
I added this one a while ago and don’t remember how I made it behave. Both Plex and Filebot refused to play nicely with it; so I actually hand named all the files before putting them into Plex. so here’s what I’ve got now:
Edit: Just checked TVDB and I guess I used the DVD order for it. I’ve just move too many files lately and couldn’t remember.
Many thanks to everyone! I’ll give it a try later but if worst comes to worst I’ll add in the meta myself or something. At least I know it’s not just me
If you happen to get Fireball XL5; you’ll run into a similar problem. It should be easiest to put it in DVD order; but that leaves out like 6 episodes. Put it in aired order and it all fits. . . it’s just more work.
I get the feeling that (Firefly aside) this will mostly affect older shows, where the aired order was different to the DVD order. I suspect I’ll have the same problem with The Prisoner.
Right, I’ve got time for a slightly lengthier reply.
First off - a huge thank you to everyone that’s helped out here. You’ve been invaluable and should consider yourselves owed a virtual beer.
My first three episodes of Stingray are indeed now showing correctly (apart from Ep2 which is just showing as ‘Episode 2’, but I know for a fact that’s because of something I did)
Some background:
For the last few years I’ve had been ripping all my DVDs and Blurays using MakeMKV (superb bit of software, has only failed me once) and Handbrake. This has all been stored on a Netgear ReadyNAS 104 (and its identical twin for backup) in two folders under one share. The two folders are ‘Films’ and ‘TV’. To view them I’ve been using Western Digital Live TV boxes (or TV Live or whatever). These are - or were - surprisingly capable devices. You basically just point them at a network share (Windows, Mac or NFS) and it just displays the files and folders there. You can tart things up nicely by having a nice graphical theme for the frontend, and they support primitive but nice tricks like “if there’s a jpg file with the same name as the mp4 file then display the graphic when you highlight the mp4” and “if a folder contains a ‘folder.jpg’ file then display that when the folder is highlighted”. Simple but effective.
Sadly these units stopped receiving software updates a couple of years ago and they’re on their way out. Granted I’ve got three of them but I felt a more up to date solution was needed. Plus, Netflix on them is starting to act up and my Samsung TVs don’t play nicely with Netflix (that’s a whole other can of worms) so I need a one-box drop-in solution.
For this I’m going to be buying a couple of new Apple TVs, since I’m mainly and Apple house (although I also have a couple of gaming PCs so the wife and I can play Elite:Dangerous). Apple look likely to be releasing new aTVs in the next few weeks, and Plex plays nicely on them so that looks like a go to me.
Plex is turning out to be something of a contradiction. In many, _many _ways it’s vastly superior to what I have been using. In others it’s oddly constrained. It seems to have an extremely rigid idea of ‘how things should be’ which is almost the polar opposite of the WDs utterly adhoc “I don’t care what you’ve called the files” approach. I have a huge job ahead of me.
I even spent a couple of hours writing myself a nice little file renamer in VB6 (don’t ask) to convert file names into Plex friendly versions:
It’s primitive but works well. I know I could buy FileBot, but £20 is a tad steep for something I can write myself. I may revisit it however.
So, a question: the answer to the Stingray question appeared to be that TheTVDB.com had incomplete information. I know for a fact that my episodes of ‘The Prisoner’ (the original - we don’t talk about the remake) are going to have the same problem. It thinks episode 2 is ‘Free For All’ when it should be ‘The Chimes of Big Ben’. Assuming it’s the same issue with TheTVDB and I permitted to add in this information myself? It seems like a slightly iffy thing to do, given that it could potentially affect thousands of people.
Edit: turns out The Prisoner just has what looks like to me to be incorrect DVD episode numbering, possibly from a different boxset. I’ll solve that one in a different way.
Edit 2: switching to Aired Order seems to have fixed it. Ho hum 
@james.c.andrew@gmail.com said:
Plex is turning out to be something of a contradiction. In many, _many _ways it’s vastly superior to what I have been using. In others it’s oddly constrained. It seems to have an extremely rigid idea of ‘how things should be’ which is almost the polar opposite of the WDs utterly adhoc “I don’t care what you’ve called the files” approach.
The reason for this is simple if you think about it:
The WDTV doesn’t have to look up information about the show online. You are supplying all info yourself by generating these wallpapers and XML files.
Plex is the opposite. It fetches all the information and artwork for a show itself.
But to be able to do that, it needs to identify the media item without doubt.
And that can be only achieved if you name your media according to the rules.
side note: I think there are several free alternatives to Filebot.
http://www.therenamer.com/ is one of them.
Oh sure, and it wasn’t a complaint, just an observation.
Thanks for the recommendation of ‘TheRenamer’ - I’ll take a look, but I’m oddly enjoying rolling my own as well. I need to be able to do things like ‘add one to the episode number from -this- point onwards’, and stuff like that. Nice little challenge.
@james.c.andrew@gmail.com said:
Thanks for the recommendation of ‘TheRenamer’ - I’ll take a look, but I’m oddly enjoying rolling my own as well. I need to be able to do things like ‘add one to the episode number from -this- point onwards’, and stuff like that. Nice little challenge.
Keep on going, then! 
Maybe consider releasing it later? The more different solutions are available for this, the better.
Never can tell
Right now though it’s working in a very limited subset of use-cases, but if I can make it more generally useful then I’ll let other people play with it.
