Imdb ratings doesn't update even when I refresh meta data

michida · December 25, 2019, 1:22pm

thank you! found it

/edit: works perfect on my synology plex! thank you so much @brainski and @kretipleti

nydave69 · December 25, 2019, 1:33pm

Now that this has been found, I wonder why the developers haven’t commented on your work, Even a hey Thanks we will look into this and see if we can have a patch/update for this problem in the near future

I think the biggest problem: Plex has is it’s lack of communication. It seems everything is done in the dark back room of the ivory tower.

Well anyway I thank you for your hard work…

.

razvan.constantin · December 25, 2019, 3:43pm

Thank you!
For my install I only had to change the string in init.py and refresh only movies without a rating.
I did not have to clear cache.

off topic a bit: where are those users commenting “All works fine for me” now?

poochie2 · December 26, 2019, 5:10pm

It makes no sense to me, but it worked, KUDOS!

mikey1armstrong · December 26, 2019, 10:05pm

Any idea what to edit using Unraid Docker?

marls · December 27, 2019, 1:16am

I love you! Thanks

Lynkage81 · December 27, 2019, 5:00am

I’m running Plex in docker and I dont have a plug-ins-xxxxx folder, just plug-ins… under that folder there is no PlexMovie.bundle, only Services.bundle and OpenMovieDatabase.bundle… i have search the whole directory and cannot find it. Any suggestions?

Jaschgu · December 27, 2019, 12:58pm

Awesome find

While I was now able to get ratings for almost all movies, three still won’t show up:

I was also unable to match two movies at all, though that might be unrelated to this issue:

EDIT: @Lynkage81 You’re searching in the data directory of Plex. The file you need to edit is in the installation directory. I don’t know where that is for Docker, mine is located at /usr/lib/plexmediaserver on Ubuntu 18.04.

tryfos79 · December 27, 2019, 2:35pm

This is an awesome find! No comments for the total indifference on Plex’s part in the issue for months!
That said I fear that the fix will not hold in future server updates, if the relative file is also updated.
Of course there are still problems:
I’m also unable to download ANY ratings for “Rambo: Last Blood (2019)”.
“Yesterday(2019)” reverts to TMDB rating (67% with a star besides it), eventhough I have IMDB as the default rating.
The whole Plex rating system is totally broken!

HugeBeard · December 27, 2019, 6:07pm

Interesting, the symptoms you describe here make this sound like a potential (CDN) caching issue, rather than simply being an issue with the “ratings=1” parameter, in particular. When we all use the same URL to retrieve the metadata for some content, likely the first request is actually retrieving the metadata live, and then the remainder of the requests, which are using the same URL, are hitting a cache of the first request and returning the cached response. To be clear, this is a server-side (likely at the CDN level) cache, and is not local to the client.
If this is correct, it means the fix plex needs to make isn’t as simple as the fix some of us may be making locally. If every plex server request changes “ratings=1” to “ratings=0”, then we’re all going to start hitting the same URL and getting the same cached/out-of-date results again. In fact, even those of us using this workaround may start seeing this issue manifest again for new movies - it would only take one of us requesting the metadata “early” to cause the rest of us to observe this same “early” (likely out-of-date) metadata. If caching is the actual root cause, the only way for all plex clients (servers, but clients relative to meta.plex.tv) to avoid the cache is to add some unique/random parameter (e.g. “&instanceId=975e20b3-14b7-42bd-b22f-f319be8f5883”) to the end of every metadata request. You could generate this unique value once for your client, and append it to the end of FREEBASE_URL, and that would ensure your client gets non-cached results relative to other clients. But that still wouldn’t help with refreshing metadata you’ve already acquired, if you noticed a rating changed after you acquired it already. If every client request needs to avoid the cache, every time, then this random parameter needs to be generated for every request (not just once) and appended to the end of every request from every client. We can potentially modify init.py further to make this happen, but obviously it would be better to see this addressed by Plex themselves, so we aren’t all trying to modify the source in non-trivial ways after every update.
The plex team will have to decide what kind of caching behavior they want, and this may explain the delay on their side (if they are aware of this issue, anyway, which isn’t clear yet). If they are okay with all clients avoiding the cache, then they can make a server-side change to disable caching altogether (in which case, no client-side changes are needed). Caching reduces operating costs and improves network performance, however, so they may want to do something smarter and use time-based caching or have clients only append random parameters, to avoid the cache, in explicit user scenarios, like when the user explicitly refreshes metadata. I’d be a little surprised if they didn’t want some caching to be enabled by default.

TLDR: brainski has found a very helpful workaround for this issue in the short term, but it may not keep working in the medium/long term if caching is the issue. If that turns out to be the case, there are further modifications to init.py that might help, but the correct fix should really be coming from plex themselves (surprise)

Jaschgu · December 28, 2019, 9:53am

That makes absolute sense! This would also explain in some way why Plex has not commented on this issue. On top of the aforementioned increased operating costs and degraded network performance, API hits on external services also cost money, especially IMDb will charge them for that. So their goal will be to minimize these hits as much as possible. I can only hope that they will find a better caching solution than the one that’s in place right now.

I guess there is not much more to do than wait now and use the workaround if ratings are outdated or non-existent.

Like @HugeBeard said, the better solution for this issue is probably appending a seperate instanceId to the URL instead of changing ratings=1 to ratings=0. This ensures that the URL will be unique to each Plex instance and you will get an up-to-date rating the first time you acquire metadata for an item. If that metadata becomes too outdated, the instanceId will have to be changed, in order to have a ‘fresh’ URL again which will not be affected by the caching.

I guess this workaround will not be working for too long, though. Either Plex was already aware of the issue and will try to shut down this workaround, or they were not aware and will finally fix this issue for all users.

x5nder · December 28, 2019, 2:13pm

So basically, in init.py we’d request the current date (with datetime) and append that to the unique identifier that we’re giving our Plex installation – that would solve it from the user side, right? In your example with today’s date, we’d get “&instanceId=975e20b3-14b7-42bd-b22f-f319be8f5883-2019-12-28” today and “&instanceId=975e20b3-14b7-42bd-b22f-f319be8f5883-2019-12-29” tomorrow?

IppoKun87 · December 28, 2019, 6:55pm

I was also unable to match two movies at all, though that might be unrelated to this issue:

You can’t match those two movies because the metadata server can’t handle movies where the IMDb ID is over 7 digits.

I already reported the issue here

chillout222 · December 30, 2019, 2:37pm

It works! Thank you for the help

mickeldaelmans · January 2, 2020, 4:02pm

Thanks for your effort! Will try this later tonight and get back to see if anything changed.

joesoes · January 2, 2020, 4:16pm

Got rating on almost all movies. For some reason, I don’t get a rating on the movie Rocketman (2019). Any clues why? OMDb API gives me the correct info.

{"Title":"Rocketman","Year":"2019","Rated":"R","Released":"31 May 2019","Runtime":"121 min","Genre":"Biography, Drama, Music, Musical","Director":"Dexter Fletcher","Writer":"Lee Hall","Actors":"Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard","Plot":"A musical fantasy about the fantastical human story of Elton John's breakthrough years.","Language":"English","Country":"UK, Canada, USA","Awards":"N/A","Poster":"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTJmMzc0YTctYmQzOS00YWJjLTgzMmEtYjE1NzA1N2QyYzE3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjg3MDMxNzU@._V1_SX300.jpg","Ratings":[{"Source":"Internet Movie Database","Value":"7.4/10"},{"Source":"Metacritic","Value":"69/100"}],"Metascore":"69","imdbRating":"7.4","imdbVotes":"80,854","imdbID":"tt2066051","Type":"movie","DVD":"N/A","BoxOffice":"N/A","Production":"Rocket Pictures","Website":"N/A","Response":"True"}

Habbi · January 5, 2020, 2:47pm

Awesome, that works perfect on my Synology, thank you very much!

mm98 · January 6, 2020, 1:48pm

What annoys me most about this is, that Plex (as usual) haven’t made any comments whatsoever, about this (cdn or cache bug) gettings fixed or “Ohhh nice find @brainski … we’ll get this fixed! Thanks!” This has become so common the last year, that an obvious bug that affects almost everyone … gets very little or none attention.

Shout out to @brainski for finding a solution for this! Thanks

pommesmatte · January 6, 2020, 2:37pm

Just wow! Thankyou @brainski for this find!

pommesmatte · January 6, 2020, 5:01pm

Ok, that fixed most of my missing and wrong IMDb ratings.

Those three movies however still have none and by looking at meta.plex. tv their IMDb entry reads always “0”, regardless what I’m doing to the URL.

https://meta.plex.tv/m/3513498?lang=de&reviews=1&extras=1&ratings=1
https://meta.plex.tv/m/7979492?lang=de&reviews=1&extras=1&ratings=1
https://meta.plex.tv/m/7315484?lang=de&reviews=1&extras=1&ratings=1

Topic		Replies	Views
[Persistent BUG!] MetaData being scraped all wrong! HELP! Desktops & Laptops server-windows	19	1200	March 17, 2020
Small percentage of files will not pull IMDb metadata Desktops & Laptops server-windows	129	3636	January 8, 2020
Put IMDB and or Rotten Tomatoes rating on my Plex Metadata & Adding Files server-windows	16	4919	April 19, 2020
"Refreshing" movie metadata not updating IMDb ratings Metadata & Adding Files server-linux	15	424	March 17, 2022
Missing ratings for some movies - Plex Movie Agent Metadata & Adding Files server-windows	4	784	December 26, 2019

Imdb ratings doesn't update even when I refresh meta data

Related topics