My I Love Lucy Season 4 episodes have incorrect imdb & tmdb & tvdb id numbers. For example, S04E05 (which is entitled Mr. and Mrs. TV Show and is I Love Lucy - S04E05 - Mr. and Mrs. TV Show in my Library) has XML info with title=“Ricky’s Movie Offer” and ids of “imdb://tt0609328” & “tmdb://214034” & “tvdb://13574”, all of which indicate Ricky’s Movie Offer. This is true for almost all of the episodes in Season 4.
I have tried to refresh metadata and created a new library, all to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Plex uses the numbering scheme from TheTVDB and TMDB. By default, TV Show libraries use TMDB for their numbering scheme unless you change that on a per-show basis (click the pencil icon on the show) or a per-library basis (Edit > Library).
Looking at TMDB for I Love Lucy, S04E05, I see that they believe that episode S04E05 is Ricky’s Movie Offer. So when Plex indexed your files, it pulls the metadata for the episode number S04E05, which results in the “wrong” episode title.
It’s not really pointed out, but Plex doesn’t care about the name of your files. All it reads is the Season/Episode number you have in the filename, and ignores everything else. So if you wish to use automated metadata gathering, you MUST use the numbering for episodes based on the metadata provider you choose.
FWIW, TheTVDB has S04E05 as the episode Mr. and Mrs. TV Show. In this specific case, you can simply change the metadata provider for the show itself by clicking the pencil icon and picking TheTVDB. I do not know if there is any other discrepancy between the two show’s numbering systems. It would be a good idea to look at the episode lists of both TVDB and TMDB to decide which one you prefer, and set that for your show/library.
Thanks for your assistance. It was not easy to find, but eventually I settled on Episode ordering The TVDB (Aired). That fixed it! Thanks!!
Glad to help. I find it strange that Plex uses TheMovieDB for TV Shows instead of TheTVDB. I mostly use TVDB because the tool I use to quickly rename all my files uses it as its database.
Could you say what tool you use to rename files? Thanks in advance!
I use Rename My TV Series. I guess there is a second version (Rename My TV Series 2), but I haven’t gotten around to installing it. The original works fine enough for me.
I plop my files into the program, list the episodes that are on TVDB that match. Make sure the online source and my files line up (as in, make sure episode 6 online is the same as MY episode 6), then click a button to rename all files at once.
