I have a group of TV series that I’ve updated on TVDB, some as far back as a week ago. Refreshing metadata in Plex or doing the “plex dance” have not gotten these series to update on my Plex. Is there a long delay in updating from TVDB?
The shows are:
Nathan For You (267002)
Beavis and Butt-Head (75863)
The Boondocks (74413)
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (74806)
RiffTrax (102531)
RiffTrax Shorts (414440)
Cunk on Britain (339732)
Kids in the Hall (75303)
I think, TVDB is lowest priority for the Plex cache and the older the title the lower the priority again… somewhat related to API restrictions at TVDB I believe. I’ve seen it take 5 days or so but more than a week seems odd.
It can regularly take 3-5 days for data ingestion from a data source to Plex’s metadata. At the show level all you should need to do is refresh the metadata. If you can provide specifics of data that isnt being processed we can look into it.
And maybe just to add to the above…
Plex is collecting its metadata from a multitude of sources. While you can configure Plex to pick up a specific episode order (e.g. one of TheTVDb’s), you can’t configure the agent to use the metadata of a single source exclusively. If Plex is sourcing a description from TMDb, you updating it on TheTVDb will have no impact.
We’ve been having an issue with the TVDB API for a while where it will report that an entry has changed but then when we go to update it the old data is still returned. This doesn’t happen all the time but does cause issues more often than we’d like.
This might be the cause of some items taking really long to update on our end.
The oldest episode I created was on 3/3, a Nathan For You special:
It’s possible that I had input this one incorrectly, because I had the “airs before” set wrong. I still don’t think that would’ve prevented it from pulling the episode data, but in Plex it has no information and just lists it as Episode 39 of the specials.
A little more recent, but another example are these Boondocks specials I created on 3/5:
Strangely, the MST3k data has updated in Plex, though the specials there were created on 3/5, same as Boondocks. So maybe they are updating, just taking a while to do so.
Are you a Plex employee or rep? I’ve seen you post in other topics where the context of your posts sound like you’re speaking with authority for Plex but without the tags saying you are a Ninja or employee that has been confusing sometimes.
Is that mostly just the metadata for the show level? If I pick TVDB as my dedicated source for a show I tend to only get TVDB art and titles\descriptions for seasons and episodes. The show level seems to get a blend of data\art but below that it seems to be TVDB specific. At least it’s different enough that I debate if I want to set a show as TVDB order or take the effort to rename the files to match TMDB depending on which one I like the descriptions\art better.
That doesn’t surprise me. I feel like their API has always been a bit of a fight at best of times. 
I am not a Plex employee and I have never claimed that I am. In your quote above that is the usage of the royal we. Depending on the root cause, it may be as simple as hopping over to the TVDB or TMDB and fixing a record or linked item. If there is an actual underlying issue with the Plex metadata Ill work to collect all the needed information and pass it to a plex employee to submit a ticket to the metadata team. Often times we the plex community can assist in troubleshooting an issue without the need to use the limited time of the plex employees. Hope that provides some context.
@dbirch
I appreciate you took the time to answer me and you’ve clarified your view of your place in the Plex community for me. Sorry for it being a bit off-topic.
@cdmjr720 and @drzoidberg33 - I can’t remember anymore but does TVDB also still keep changes in draft for a bit before approval as well? So if you changed something on Monday, it will be there on TVDB right away on Monday but not really committed until a TVDB admin confirms the change on say Wednesday? Would that account for some delay in those updates as well? It’s been so long since I’ve wrangled with TVDB process but that came up in my mind and would certainly account for additional delays compared to TMDB where they accept automatically and mostly just go back if there’s reports.
I’m not aware of a draft/approval process, but the items I updated are viewable even when not signed in or when checking in Private Browse. I would operate under the assumption that this means they are fully published.
We can probably consider this closed. I went in and edited the specials I’d created and saved them again (I didn’t even change any information) and a day or so later that seems to have triggered the proper refresh. They’re all matching now.
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