Plex does not handle changes like this well! Episodes can switch from watched to unwatched upon metadata refresh so beware. Also, as this change has started to make its way into plex you will see the episode thumbnails are starting to mess up with episodes choices and earshot using the same thumbnail, see → https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/show/buffy-the-vampire-slayer/season/3. Even using tvdb episode ordering does not help with this.
Maybe if someone from plex (@adriana) could review the metadata on their side and fix this up if it does not resolve itself within 48/72 hours.
Ugh… thanks for the heads up … fighting these “decisions” is never fun.
Earshot is not the intended final episode of Season 3 and mine aren’t in the current locked TMDB aired order so I might have to flip to TVDB for meta data as mine are DVD rips where that episode was put in intended order instead of aired order (like Firefly … coincidentally).
Edit: TheTVDB was annoying metdata … I changed my files to match Season 3 for TMDB “aired order” instead.
No worries, glad its of some help. This has been a major annoyance for me and while I cannot control what TMDB do and how it effects plex I can now safely and accurately detect these ahead of time so I can fix it before it comes an issue.
As an FYI… I started using FileBot to detect these type of changes. As I include title in my filenames the basic logic being if FileBot detected a filename needing to be changed then something at the online source has changed.
I try to put episode names in my files to help me keep track when things go off like this sometimes.
Filebot has been a regularly recommended tool and looks great, but I haven’t picked it up myself yet because my TV show collection always remains small enough to fix manually (and I don’t keep TV shows around much to rewatch except for some favorites) but your use case is a good example of where it could be more handy than I realized.
And yeah… the change borked my thumbnails and metadata a bit … might have to Plex dance it to fix it (or maybe the DBRepair tool will clean it up). I’ll wait until the caches update first.
Don’t think a dance will do anything. They are messed up https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/show/buffy-the-vampire-slayer/season/3 which is why I’m asking the plex staff to check their back-end. It may sort itself out in a few days but sometimes with changes of this nature the plex back-end needs a little kick !
BTW, I also switched this show to use tvdb aired episode ordering so will keep an eye on it this week and see if it resolves.
