I record a lot of kids shows from PBS (e.g., Curious George, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, etc.). Each aired segment contains two small episodes. That is, one 30-minute slot contains two 15-minute episodes. Each mini-episode is listed as an independent episode in TVDB, but they are listed jointly as one episode in the TV guide. So, when Plex schedules and records my episodes, the metadata matching from TVDB gets all messed up. For example, Plex records Curious George S05E07, which contains two min-episodes (“George’s Home Run / Monkey on Ice”–episodes 13 and 14 if treated independently). But because these mini-episodes are treated standalone in TVDB, this episode gets tagged as “Downhill Racer” (the 7th mini-episode).
Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so, what do you do? If I do nothing, my episode titles are way off in Plex, so it gets difficult to find the requested episode for my children. (I also wonder if this will mess up future recordings because Plex metadata will differ from broadcast listings.) But I also don’t want to manually override everything in Plex. I could edit the entries in TVDB, but I can see why some would catalog the mini-episodes independently and would be upset by me changing things.
Check out the TV Show Naming Docs, specifically under the heading Multi-Episode Files. That will give you the correct naming, but it will be shown as multiple items in the library.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the way the above is handled so I manually split shows that are like this in my library. More leg work, but works much better in the end.
@adamskoog said:
Check out the TV Show Naming Docs, specifically under the heading Multi-Episode Files. That will give you the correct naming, but it will be shown as multiple items in the library.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the way the above is handled so I manually split shows that are like this in my library. More leg work, but works much better in the end.
Hmmm… You’re right, I don’t think that’s an ideal solution. I would have to constantly rename incoming files, and the new episode designations would now differ from the DVR guide and so Plex would get confused about which episodes I already have.
I think my ideal solution is to write a new metadata agent that knows how to translate what Plex supplies and pull the appropriate info from tvdb (e.g., if Plex says episode 7, know that it is episodes 13 & 14 in dbtv).
Unfortunately, no… You can sometimes find success using tmdb as your metadata agent, but I found more often than not it was the same as tvdb. It really seems like it would be easy to make Plex’s DVD ordering option work with multi-part episodes. There was a third-party plugin that did this well but it was shut down when Plex built-in DVD ordering. Except Plex’s implementation does not handle this . I also think it would be easy to write an agent that looked to a local database that I could easily populate, but I lack the necessary programming skills to make that work.
I have found a partial workaround for the problem of the DVR and tvdb metadata not matching. If you record to a library using the “personal media shows” agent Plex will retain the metadata from the guide without overwriting it with data from tvdb. I only consider it a partial workaround because you lose out on tvdb’s artwork, show descriptions, etc. but in my experience the guide metadata is usually sane while tvdb mismatches the actual programming often enough to annoy.
That said, when loading guide data Plex does not seem to update the metadata on an upcoming recording if the description changes but the episode/season numbers do not. This results in a show being left with a generic description if the detailed description doesn’t get added to the guide until a few days before the show airs.
Hmm, I might have to try this! My main concern is that I already have several seasons of kids shows, I imagine the TV guide data for those episodes is long-gone. Disappointed that this is still an issue with Plex DVR.
I’m still having the same issue. As far as I know, other servers such as Emby handle this correctly. Is there any idea when Plex is going to fix the issue?
Literally the only reason I got Plex Pass was because I got up on my roof, installed an antenna, got a TV capture card, and want to record Daniel Tiger episodes for my kids. Plex is screwing it all up. Plex even names the files (eg: Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood (2012) - S04E05 - Daniel Visits the Dentist; Daniel’s First Haircut.ts) but when selecting this video in Plex it shows up as Jodi’s First Day of school! 1 episode, and the wrong one at that! Is there a fix for this?
Once recorded Plex uses the Season/Episode data to pull metadata from TheTVDB. So it is showing the title for Season 4 Episode 5 as listed on their site. The show recorded is actually episodes 9 and 10 of season 4.
I discovered a workaround to get episode names showing correctly. See Kids TV Shows - Bad episode metadata issues here for more info. However, the workaround is temporary and should likely be used when searching for an episode.
. I also think it would be easy to write an agent that looked to a local database that I could easily populate, but I lack the necessary programming skills to make that work.
