Incorrect/Missing DVD Order for The Office (US) Season 4

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#: 1.21.3.4014
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.51.1

I’ve found that despite setting The Office (US) to use DVD order, Plex is naming two-part episodes according to the airing order. Single part episodes are OK. I first noticed this behavior with Season 4 which has a number of episodes which were two parts when aired but combined into single episodes on the DVDs.

For example, S04E01 and S04E02 are automatically labeled as “Fun Run (1)” and “Fun Run (2)”. This does match the TVDB ordering for the ‘Aired Order’ but does not match the DVD order which shows that S04E01 is “Fun Run” and S04E02 is “Dunder Mifflin Infinity”. Curiously, the labeling of S04E05, the first non-double episode, does match the DVD ordering and is correctly identified as “Local Ad”.

Episode Orders:
https://thetvdb.com/series/the-office-us/seasons/official/4
https://thetvdb.com/series/the-office-us/seasons/dvd/4

I’ve gone ahead and performed “The Plex Dance” to completely wipe the metadata for season 4 and re-add it as described in the link below, but it did not change the result:
https://forums.plex.tv/t/the-plex-dance/197064

I also had a look at the logs and poked around in some of the URLs I found it querying when asked to refresh the metadata for the episodes mentioned above. I won’t pretend that I know how Plex works internally and which data retrievals are important in this situation, but I did find it interesting that the data for the double episodes giving me trouble does not include DVD Episode or Season number while the data for the single episodes, which are correct, does.

Looking at the data returned from https://tvdb2.plex.tv/series/73244/episodes?page=1 you can see that “Fun Run (1)” has both the dvdSeason and dvdEpisodeNumber set to null:

51
id 335408
airedSeason 4
airedSeasonID 28425
airedEpisodeNumber 1
episodeName “Fun Run (1)”
firstAired “2007-09-27”
guestStars […]
directors […]
writers […]
overview “In the hour long season …ontinuing relationship.”
language {…}
productionCode “401”
showUrl “”
lastUpdated 1600191694
dvdDiscid “”
dvdSeason null
dvdEpisodeNumber null
dvdChapter null
absoluteNumber 54
filename “series/73244/episodes/5f6147a98b8c4.jpg”
seriesId 73244
lastUpdatedBy 171
airsAfterSeason null
airsBeforeSeason null
airsBeforeEpisode null
imdbId “tt1026035”
contentRating “TV-14”
thumbAuthor 1
thumbAdded “2019-11-13 13:47:37”
thumbWidth “640”
thumbHeight “360”
siteRating 8
siteRatingCount 1257
isMovie 0

The same is true for “Fun Run (2)” which comes from https://tvdb2.plex.tv/series/73244/episodes?page=2:

id 4075826
airedSeason 4
airedSeasonID 28425
airedEpisodeNumber 2
episodeName “Fun Run (2)”
firstAired “2007-09-27”
guestStars […]
directors […]
writers […]
overview “In the hour long season …ontinuing relationship.”
language {…}
productionCode “402”
showUrl “”
lastUpdated 1574423423
dvdDiscid “”
dvdSeason null
dvdEpisodeNumber null
dvdChapter null
absoluteNumber 55
filename “series/73244/episodes/5f6147cdefaec.jpg”
seriesId 73244
lastUpdatedBy 100873
airsAfterSeason null
airsBeforeSeason null
airsBeforeEpisode null
imdbId “tt1026035”
contentRating “TV-14”
thumbAuthor 1
thumbAdded “2019-11-13 13:47:37”
thumbWidth “640”
thumbHeight “360”
siteRating 7.7
siteRatingCount 530
isMovie 0

While the entry for “Local Ad” does correctly list the dvdSeason and dvdEpisodeNumber as 4 and 5 respectively:

52
id 337901
airedSeason 4
airedSeasonID 28425
airedEpisodeNumber 9
episodeName “Local Ad”
firstAired “2007-10-25”
guestStars […]
directors […]
writers […]
overview “Dunder Mifflin decides t…ife, an online website.”
language {…}
productionCode “409”
showUrl “”
lastUpdated 1436280260
dvdDiscid “”
dvdSeason 4
dvdEpisodeNumber 5
dvdChapter null
absoluteNumber 62
filename “episodes/73244/337901.jpg”
seriesId 73244
lastUpdatedBy 1
airsAfterSeason null
airsBeforeSeason null
airsBeforeEpisode null
imdbId “tt1031473”
contentRating “TV-14”
thumbAuthor 1
thumbAdded “2019-11-13 13:47:37”
thumbWidth “640”
thumbHeight “360”
siteRating 7.9
siteRatingCount 1174
isMovie 0

It looks like the database query results may be missing some of the DVD order information. It also seems like the Plex server may be falling back on the Airing order if it cannot find a matching DVD Season and Episode. These two things would explain why some episodes are correctly identified with DVD order but others are not. This is all just speculation.

I should also mention that the video files are named quite simply as “Episode SxxExx.mkv” in the path “The Office (US)\Season 04”.

Has anyone else run into this or a similar problem? Can anyone else reproduce this specific behavior? Or how about a fix :slight_smile:

I’m happy to provide logs if they would be helpful. Just let me know what’s relevant or if I should upload the entire .zip.

Thanks!

2

It’s been a bit, but I posted about what I think is the same issue here:

I wound up just using the airing order and doing the two-part episodes.

3

Thanks for the reply! I’m glad to know that it’s not just my problem :slight_smile:

Per your suggestion I’ve adopted a similar (or maybe the same?) workaround. I’m using the airing order and have changed the filenames so that they skip the episodes that are the second parts of the double episodes. It now goes S04E01, S04E03, S04E05, etc. It works.

To satisfy my own curiosity I did some more experimenting and I’m pretty sure this is a bug either in the DB construction or the API.

The double episodes listed in the DVD order are not the same, and are not linked to, the corresponding episodes for the Airing order.

I’ll use Fun Run as an example

Here’s the TVDB URL for the episode as linked by the airing order:
https://thetvdb.com/series/the-office-us/episodes/335408

At the top where it shows the various orders for a given episode, DVD order is not listed:
image

Also notice the ID number, 335408, embedded in the URL. If I use this ID to query the database like this:
https://tvdb2.plex.tv/episodes/335408

I get the data for that episode as one would expect:

data
id 335408
airedSeason 4
airedSeasonID 28425
airedEpisodeNumber 1
episodeName “Fun Run (1)”
firstAired “2007-09-27”
…

However, the episode linked to by the DVD ordering has a different ID of 7934957:
https://thetvdb.com/series/the-office-us/episodes/7934957

This episode does not show a corresponding Airing order or Absolute order (which may additionally explain why it’s missing from the series queries I looked at in my original post):
image

And if I query the database using this episode’s ID like this:
https://tvdb2.plex.tv/episodes/7934957

I get:

“{"Error":"ID: 7934957 not found"}”

I don’t have an API key to use with the official TVDB API server so I can’t verify that this behavior happens there as well. Otherwise, I’d go ahead and file a ticket since, as I said above, this looks like a bug.

4

there is a new tv agent being tested (available from the forum thread @ New Plex Media Server TV show/series scanner and agent preview ) please note this is TESTING/PREVIEW so be sure to follow all instructions including backing up your database etc.

since all effort is being put into the new scanner, its unlikely that issues with the current scanner are going to be fixed or addressed.

you can wait until the new tv scanner goes into wider beta or public release, if you don’t want to risk your library during testing.

5

Thanks for pointing this out.

leveraging our own cloud metadata provider

Am I reading that right in that TVDB will no longer be used as a source either directly or indirectly? If so, then yeah, this seems like a moot point for Plex.

It would still be a ‘good citizen’ thing to do to report the problem to TVDB if there’s anyone on here with access to their servers who can verify the behavior.

6

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