This is a heads up to the community. I noticed today after watching The Tower S03E04 that the title of the episode was odd and not using correct episode titles. Upon checking I can see plex has now switched to scraping the title from imdb over what tmdb and tvdb used. IMDB use a different format to what the official episodes are for this show which is why it stood out to me.
Here is how The Tower looks now, using Episode #3.4 as the title …
Thanks for this.
That explains where the episode titles for the 1st 3 episodes of The Day of the Jackal came from as TVDB and TMDB do not have the same format.
Kind of annoying that this changed without any notice (unless of course something “happened” on the backend and this was not meant to actually change). Though I did not think IMDB was used for TV series info.
On the face of it this appears to be a case of more is preferred. The imdb titles have more characters, its taken over the correct episode names which exist at tmdb and tvdb.
Anyhow, no point complaining, just letting the community who actually care about metadata know about the change.
We’ve very recently started ingesting IMDB data for episodes but the only time we’ll use this data is when there isn’t existing data from TMDB/TVDB.
In this specific case for The Tower it’s failing back to IMDB because neither of those sources have episode titles so I’m guessing it would skip them both and inevitably end up using the IMDB one.
I’ll have to confirm that this is the intended behaviour but probably.
Yes they do, its titled Episode 1 etc… This is how many shows from UK networks like UTV, BBC etc… titles episodes. I guess the logic in your code is wrong but its good your checking its intended.
Yes, sorry I mean they have generic titles. We’ll always prefer non-generic titles if another source has one, which is what I suspect is happening due to the IMDB title being different.
Sure but in essence what’s happening is plex is now using the generic/default titles from imdb over the correct titles from TMDB. Anyhow, will leave it with you. Thanks.
Hoping this gets resolved soo as manually editing metadata for these is a pain. In the UK episode titles are more the exception than the rule so where TVDB and TMDB have titles as Episode 1, Episode 2 etc those are typically the correct title as opposed to suggesting a lack of title. The IMDB titles used instead are just that site’s own in house ones that aren’t used anywhere else.
Bit of a useless +1 post really, but I’ve just run into this for the first time here in the UK and it indeed came as an unwelcome surprise. Certainly hoping for a reversion !
@drzoidberg33 Any update on this? This change really feels like some higher up’s personal views being pushed on to the users without giving an option for the behavior. I know I personally prefer an episode title to just be Episode 1 instead of Episode #1.1 if there is not a title. Having to manually update the titles is a workaround but is also a pain to have to do for each episode/series that this impacts.
The new metadata ingestion is currently running, which does prevent generic IMDb episode titles from overriding other generic titles.
Since this involves a lot of internet services, databases, and caches, give it at least 72 hours before trying to refresh metadata of an affected show.
For English as well. TMDB had the actual title for the episode since January 29th, yet it still shows this garbage. I was wondering, where those retarded titles are coming from, now I know. Great explanation though, “we prefer generic titles in weird format over the generic titles in the conventional format.” Thanks, guys, well done. Just FYI, from the person who edited TV show data on various databases for over the decade - IMDB is crap for TV shows. It’s the last place anyone sane would go. I can tell with 99% certainty that if neither TVDB, TMDB, or TVmaze has the title for the episode - whatever you will find on IMDb will be a made-up bs.
I’m on my way off plex and moving to an alternate however as the person who started this thread (previous forum account deleted) I will respond this once in the vain hope that plex might listen for those who remain …
This is a mixture of IMDB titles and TMDB titles, some mixing across episodes parts “The Penitent - Part 1” and “The Penitent (2)”. Oh, and its not just season, the whole show is a mess like this.
The consolidated metadata approach & ranking of that data which plex decided to move to on paper appeared a good idea but its a mess and not fit for purpose. ANYONE who actually cares about metadata knows this, especially those of us who contribute to the online sources. There are AI written summaries all over the place, pulled from IMDB which its a dumpster for bad data and then there are the major limitations like “DAHMER” which are well documented on the forum and nothing done to fix it.
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