We know that with the new modern agent/scanner its a consolidation of metadata from multiple sources. However, we don’t have control over things like Title, Summary etc… as the plex scrapper uses its own logic to decide what is the best metadata to use.
Within the advanced options we can choose which Ratings Source we want. It would be nice to have the ability to choose which online source we would like for other metadata. For example, I would like all my movies titles and summaries to come from TMDB and no where else.
Is there anyway to better influence the summaries plex is pulling for movies and shows ? I’ve noticed more and more long winded plot summaries coming from IMDB plots rather than shorter concise summaries contained on TMDB. I can give lots of examples some linked in my initial post in this thread.
Its also happening for shows – westworld being one I noticed today. Awful summary of the show.
Its terrible that with so much improvements coming from the new modern scanner/agent but that designers from plex believe its best to blindly decide that this one piece of metadata (summary) is best to take from IMDB due to length. Should be TMDB with fall back to IMDB/TVDB if none exists, like pretty much all other metadata they scrape.
EDIT: With the example of westworld plex is getting the summary from this location Westworld (TV Series 2016– ) - Plot Summary - IMDb and blindly just picking the second one on the list from IMDB due to the fact the first one is short. Stupid !!!
Given the lack of control over metadata source when using the ‘Plex Series’ TV metadata agent, I’ve now reverted back to ‘TheTVDB’ TV metadata agent. I know it’s legacy and slower, but it’s consistent and unambiguous in how it works: using it means I know exactly where to go and make metadata corrections if they’re needed (e.g., I especially hate trying to get metadata corrected on IMDB). Switching back and having metadata work as expected is well worth the trade-off of having having Plex now constantly flag that I should ‘upgrade’ my library.
Plex, please give us the option to specify which metadata source to use when using the newer agents.
Agreed, I’m not a fan of IMDb’s data. Many films have matching issues due to errors in IMDb’s data. It would be great if we could choose the source!
Or at least we could have the option to set a priority, because many titles match perfectly fine on TMDB. However, issues arise when there are problems with the associated IMDb IDs, leading to matching errors within Plex. Having the ability to prioritize TMDB could help resolve some of these issues.
I avoided the new agents/libraries for as long as I could but now that Plex has dropped the OMEGA NUCLEAR CODE RED warning that my library is going to imminently break, I decided to convert my movies library. The end result was significantly worse metadata across the board and having to fix literally thousands of posters that were switched for garbage.
I can’t pretend to understand what motivation drove the decision to unilaterally make the metadata worse, but given that the decision has been made, at least giving users some control would be a good thing.
Thanks dokuro for tagging this feature request in a thread I made, voted. Hope this comes true.
Even if you have thousands of movies, take it one movie at a time, a few every day and you’ll be there in no time and will thank yourself in the long run. Both https://mediux.pro and https://theposterdb.com are excellent resources.
Thanks for posting this feature request. I recently switched to the new agents and that has forced me to go through a forced rename to include tvdb or tmdb ID’s in folder names to help the new matching fix a number of issues.
That said, the I’ve found the new agent still does a sub-par job with some of my shows and movies, some examples:
Some movie titles were changed to a language other than my library default (English)
Some movies lost their posters and none could be found when editing them individually
Some movie titles were changed to a file name which didn’t match the actual file name
Some Anime series matched incorrectly because I wasn’t using the canonicalized name for the folder (this might be an issue of my own creating - I resolved this by renaming folders to include the tvdb id per conventions)
