I have scheduled Dateline to record all new and re-run episodes. They are recorded just fine and playback fine as well.
The problem is that the details that plex shows are ALWAYS wrong. 100% of the time the title and description is for a different episode than what is actually recorded. The filename is accurate as to the episode that aired, meaning it shows the right season and episode number. But the UI display in my client shows a different episode and description.
It’s just Dateline. All of my other shows work just as expected. Any ideas?
This sounds like a mismatch between the EPG data and what’s on TVDB. It’s worth looking at TVDB and seeing what’s there and if that lines up with what you’re seeing.
Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, you’re right. TVDB has pretty much all Dateline episodes listed incorrectly. My sample was an episode where the recording file name was “Dateline NBC (1992) - S24E49 - The Feud.mkv”. Plex’s interface identified the name of the episode as “The Murder of Martha Moxley”. TVDB’s Website said that 49 was the Martha Moxley episode and that 46 was actually The Feud. The actual recording when I play it, is The Feud.
I googled the Season 24 episode list, and sure enough, The Fued is correct for 49, and Martha Moxley is actually episode 53. Basically every single episode for Dateline on TVDB is inaccurate.
Is there a way to have Plex ignore TVDB and use the metadata from the EPG? This is happening on more than half the shows I record (Nature, Newshour Weekend, Curious George, Splash and Bubbles – mostly PBS shows). I confirmed that the issue is always that the EPG episode number and the TVDB episode number don’t match – but the “description” of the episode on the EPG (i.e., whats in the filename) is always the correct one and the description provided by TVDB is always the incorrect one.
This makes the TVDB metadata pretty useless. Even if the details were not as rich from only the EPG, it would be preferable to get the episode name right.
I think if you used a different TV show library, and disabled the TVDB agent for that library, and selected “Personal Media Shows” (under Advanced when you add a library), then it would only use the metadata from the EPG. Not ideal, but I think that should give you what you want.
Well, that sort of worked. It does use the metadata (season, episode, description) from the EPG. However, it doesn’t recognize things like “PBS Newshour” as a TV Show. If you set the filter to “folders” you can see the recordings, but setting the filter to “TV Shows” yields “No items in this library”. So something is also definitely broken.
Is there any way to rectify this? I think ideally, we would probably pull the show-level and season-level art and metadata from TVDB (because these seem correct) and the episode level stuff from the EPG.
