I know this is an old thread, but I have the answer you are looking for. First off, let’s use the latest Hard Knocks as an example. August 5, 2025 was episode 1 for Training Camp with the Buffalo Bills. This is actually season 20 episode 1 of Hard Knocks: Training Camp (according to the Plex Series Agent). I know, it should be season 25, but it is not. The system identifies it as season 20. Be sure to not only your folder labeled as “Season 20”, but also the episode as “Hard Knocks s20e01”. Of course you can add more text than that afterwards to describe the file if you would like, but it is not necessary. That said, it picked up the episode for me on Plex with all the correct metadata right away. Depending on where you download it from, it may be labeled as “Hard.Knocks.Training.Camp.with.the.Buffalo.Bills.S01E01”, but it should be “s20e01”. Not “s01e01”. And yes, you can have the Training Camp with the Buffalo Bills in front of the s20e01 like the following:
Edit: I am using the Plex Series Agent to recognize shows and not TVDB or IMDB as I have had many issues across many different shows over the years using those agents. I have had less issues with the Plex Series Agent overall.
Thanks for chiming in, but that workaround doesn’t fix the entire issue. That will work for the training camp seasons since they are grouped together as one show in TMDB. The problem is there are also the In Season and Offseason seasons of Hard Knocks which are classified as separate shows by TMDB, but are part of the same show for TVDB.
Within Plex, they have merged all of the shows together, but will only pull the metadata from the main Training Camp version in TMDB. Allowing us to pull the metadata from the TVDB airing order (since the Plex version of the show is linked to the TVDB show, but for some reason doesn’t have the option of the airing order like is available for most shows) would fix the issue. Alternatively, separating the shows within Plex to use the TMDB metadata for the In Season and Offseason shows would also work. But currently the metadata for those seasons is unavailable within Plex despite being in both TMDB and TVDB.
I haven’t tried the other versions of Hard Knocks yet. At least we got the training Camp issue resolved by knowing we are actually on Season 20 according to the Plex Series Agent and not the TVDB. I did not mention which agent I am using in my previous reply, but I am actually using the Plex Series Agent. I will work on the other versions of the Hard Knocks seasons this year as the NFL season carries on and I will update this thread with any findings or solutions on my end. I think using the Plex Series Agent and naming the other seasons as “Hard Knocks In Season” and “Hard Knocks Off Season” may resolve the issue and those seasons for this year would be Season 5 for the “In Season” and Season 2 for the “Offseason”. Thanks for your feedback as well.
No, this is wrong and is what we’re trying to correct. TVDB for whatever reason is not available for this series. The new season is 25, not 20. Also none of those filenames would be correct, whether you have it as season 20 or season 25.
Plex uses TMDB as the primary source for show info. Yes, even when you set it to use theTVDB as the episode ordering. There are metadata fields on the record for a program on the TMDB for matching it to its counterpart on theTVDB and IMDB. Plex uses these to help facilitate the matching of the different sources and episode orders.
Looking at the records for this show on TMDB now, I don’t see these ID numbers for theTVDB nor the IMDB filled in. This is likely part of the reason this issue has gone on as long as it has.
Edit: Since I’m not busy at the moment I’ve been filling in the TVDB ID numbers. I have done the Specials and seasons 1-5, and when I got to season 6 I see the ID numbers for TVDB and IMDB are filled in, so it looks like someone else has been working on this too. But many later seasons were also missing ID numbers.
When changes like this are made you will normally have to wait three days for them to propagate to Plex’s TV Series agent before you can refresh metadata and see the changes on your server.
Edit2: I’ve finished this now. All episodes now have TVDB episode IDs associated with them. All episodes except the two specials also have IMDB IDs now as well (I’m not finding records for the specials on IMDB). 156 record edits total.
