I recently changed my agent on my TV Shows library due to the nagging warning in the menu that’s impossible to hide. Plex refuses to find/match or allow any type of metadata override whatsoever for a specific series on the new Plex Agent (different subject/forum topic that’s been open for months with no reply). I switched back to TheTVDB agent for my TV Shows, which pulls all metadata correctly, but then Plex puts the “Upgrade Library” warning in all the menus and you can’t get rid of it again.
While using TheTVDB agent, I made sure all metadata pulled correctly, then I manually set some additional new metadata, locked all fields I changed, and “upgraded” the agent back to the new Plex agent again. Every single piece of custom metadata I had saved/locked in that entire library reset and overrode with the new Plex Agent metadata, which pulled incorrect information for the same series again and was exactly what I was trying to avoid in the first place, and had already manually corrected once. Now I’m back to where I started with several hours wasted, and a series that keeps merging with another regardless of how I try to split them because IMDB (and ONLY IMDB) has the series listed wrong.
Why is ANYTHING allowed to override a metadata field that is locked? I spent several hours looking up metadata for individual episodes and locking every single field just to have the agent change delete everything I’d done. I even unchecked the “Refresh all metadata after upgrade” checkbox so NONE of the metadata should have updated or changed in any way when I upgraded the agent, yet even without a rescan/update all my customizations are totally gone.
would need your logs after this happened. I had lots of custom locked metadata before change over which is still locked and i could not repro when i just tried upgrading with a test library i kept on old agent
I just did this same procedure (change agents, update, lock metadata, upgrade agent) on a single series to attempt to reproduce again (and to get cleaner/newer logs), and this time it did save as expected. I’m starting to wonder if my browser maybe wasn’t actually saving the changes I was making when I was updating all this data. I’m on a different PC today and there are other odd things in the web interface that are behaving slightly different now that I’m paying attention. Libraries are dynamically changing/refreshing and yesterday I had to keep refreshing every time I changed something.
I will investigate more on my side before bothering anyone further with this, however, this issue that spawned me to do all this is still happening and might be minor if someone could take a look.
I was wrong. It happened again, on two different machines/servers this time, but still with the same series. I set my libraries to the old agent with TheTVDB. Refreshed metadata for The Challenge Champs vs Stars. Matched and all metadata pulled correct. Went episode by episode locking all metadata, both seasons, and the series itself. Changed my TV library agent back to new Plex agent. Refreshed all metadata. The Challenge Champs vs Stars merged with The Challenge Champs vs Pros again incorrectly and all locked metadata was removed, and it will not allow me to override the match in any way. The only thing I can do is unsplit the match and set all metadata manually and lock again, but I’m not confident that will keep anymore either. I don’t understand why changing the agent and/or refreshing all metadata for the library overrides any locked data.
for those particular shows ( the two Challenges) it is combining them because we only have one entry for it so they when changed to new agent they are getting the same GUID and getting merged. The reason we only have one is as far as we can tell is because IMDB merged them into one and redirecting to the wrong show. We made a change on TMDB which we hope should fix it but will take about 48 hours before we get updated metadata and have info for both shows.
I’m aware of IMDB having it as one show and that’s why the Plex agent is combining them by default. What I don’t understand is why my locked metadata got overwritten again, and why can’t I use tvdb-ID in the search or {tvdb-ID} in the folder/file name on ONLY this one series. It works on every other I’ve tried.
The TVDB is only for search and when it searches it only finds the one result for the show as a whole and is merging them and just using the "Vs Pros because that is the only data we have currently since it can’t keep both in a merge. If you did not have “The Challenge Champs vs Pros” as well then it would likely keep that data you typed in. But again I would wait a couple days before trying to add “…vsStars” again.
I think I get why it matches the same and why the search term/tag isn’t fixing the match now. I even get why they keep merging. So thanks for that explanation.
If both series had locked metadata or neither did, then I would expect whichever was the match should take metadata priority because they are identical, but in this instance one was locked and one wasn’t. Why did the locked metadata not take priority in the merge? That’s the one thing I’m still not understanding. I get that it didn’t match anything but if the assumed match was a merge with another series, I would think it would still preserve locked data if possible despite not matching what the agent finds. In other instances the agent doesn’t overwrite this data like this, but it does on a match merge?
I’ll try to re-add the show to my library early next week and see if there’s any difference. I appreciate your help.
There has been no change to this. Still unable to match Vs Stars no matter how I search, and attempting to match it merges both series, which unlocks and changes all metadata for episodes it considers duplicates. Vs Pros has 1 season of 6 episodes, so those 6 episodes of Vs Stars get their metadata unlocked and overwritten. Locked metadata remains unchanged for episodes 7-8 of season 1 and all of season 2 because Vs Pros does not have corresponding/matching episode numbers, so there is nothing to merge. It still adds them to the same combined series, but they retain their locked metadata from Vs Stars so now I end up with a mix of both.
Still not understanding why the locked metadata is not the preferred value when a merge is taking place and there is a conflict. If both were locked or neither were locked, the match should of course take priority, but in this case where one is locked and the other isn’t, why does the locked data not win?
