I’ve had a couple of discussions on TMDB regarding their guidelines and decision making processes and they seem pretty hard headed about things.
The latest glitch I’ve run into is with the West Wing. I’m not sure how episode counts and names can be so off between IMDB and TMDB for the same show.
TMDB seems to be used as the default in Plex. It’s nice that movies can sourced with IMDB id tags, but I’m not sure why its not the same for series. Though I have gotten away with other source ids when using filebot with anime/ cartoons.
Wishing there was an alterative service that is flexible with the content in it’s DB and thoughtful with the various releases of shows and movies. For example the original air dates/ episodes versus a DVD release or special editions.
While it is the default for episode ordering, you can change it at the library level (Manage Library > Edit > Advanced > Episode ordering), or the show level (Edit show > Advanced > Episode ordering). If any of TVDB’s orderings are a better match for the ordering your files use, like TVDB’s DVD order, you can switch to that. IMDb ordering is not supported though.
It’s not ordering that’s the issue. Look up the west wing season 3 on TMDB and IMDB, the differences are glaring. This is not the only show/ movie where things are absurdly off.
There is a reedit of caligula that TMDB refuses to allow in the DB.
They choose to use the wide theatrical release as the movie’s release date instead of the premier which defies everyone else’s release date, even the studio.
I could go on…
You are free to edit the metadata yourself. I did that with the release date of a movie because TMDB was listing its wide-release date, and not the original limited-release date, which made it appear I had two movies for the same year in my “Best Picture” winners collection.
A TV season being broken up into different numbers of episodes per season would be more complicated of course. You’ll likely just have to pick whether you’re going to use TMDB or TVDB for that specific show and renumber your files to match.
Right, but for Series, Plex is getting it’s meta data from TMDB so if it doesn’t match or an episode doesn’t exist you’re missing things. You can’t mix local meta data and sourced meta data in plex.
Can’t tell if Plex should be more flexible, the DB’s should be more flexible or both.
Yes, you can edit Meta data in plex, but if you mess up moving files or reinstall from scratch for whatever reason its gone.
I feel like my experience has been that if I pick TVDB DVD order it pulls the TVDB info but maybe it only does that if there’s no specific match already in IMDB\TMDB or maybe that’s changed a bit since I last did much with it. I know if I flip ordering source I have to manually change the artwork for the episodes but I thought the other data updated. Last I did this was for Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel but they had oddities between TVDB\TMDB already and kinda messy at TVDB so might’ve been a bad example.
It does get annoying if you have to redo it for some reason - I always have to set Firefly as TVDB DVD order. Emby\Jellyfin\Kodi solve this with NFO files - which Plex says they’ll support Soon™. Plex’s advantage in the past partially was not needing NFO files. So it’s kinduva funny reversal. There are advantages and disadvantages to Plex controlling a combined metadata cache rather than pulling directly from the sites. Luckily it’s usually pretty easy to backup and restore Plex DB so hopefully doesn’t happen to us often.
Plex does not support using IMDB’s episode ordering for series, so what’s there doesn’t really matter. If this is about the episode “Isaac and Ishmael” that is not considered a regular season episode, per the show’s own runners:
It’s a special, and is listed as one on both TMDB and TVDB for Aired Order.
It’s listed as S03E01 in the DVD order. So why aren’t you just using that?
If you have a problem with a lack of info on the TMDB, go contribute. That’s how crowd-sourced media databases work.
Does Plex actually pull from multiple sources with Series as it does for Movies?
I’ve never read that in the docs and you actually pick a source for a series library.
I think NFO files would actually be nice or some concept of a virtual library where you could have a multiple libraries that pull from various providers but all the content appears as one library.
The primary source seems to be TMDB, but they do use multiple sources. I have programs that are not listed on TMDB at all but I’m getting metadata, including cover/backdrops for them, from Plex
Some issues are more annoying that others, however TMDB argues that their release date is more accurate than the actual studios it goes to show how rigid their thinking is. Is that a big deal.. Well it depends on who’s using it, Plex displays the correct date, other tools like filebot don’t.
But in my example of Season 3 for West wing, who’s is right. IMDB with it’s 22 episodes and titles or TMDB with it’s 21 episodes and titles. Do we go to the studio air dates do we go with the dvd realease… are those two examples the actual difference or is there something else.
I’m just saying there is a lot of variation to media and it would be nice to figure out ways to handle that.
I know they cross reference at least and do combine some data.
For example, if an episode has a title instead of just a number they’ll use that title no matter which source has it including IMDB. There was an issue where IMDB used episode number as the title and that threw it off for people until it got sorted - I can’t remember which show that happened just that it was an odd situation.
Plex also definitely cross references between TVDB, TMDB and IMDB. The different sites will link to the other sites per series and Plex uses the different series IDs linked between services to help with their combined cache data which is why when series IDs get messed up it can throw things off; recently happened with The Rookie at TVDB I think.
Overall though - I do believe that they present info mostly based on the source and order choice. If you pick TVDB DVD order you’ll get different artwork choices and episode details than if you use TMDB. To what extent they mix and match though I don’t know.
As far as NFO files… you basically set a text file in the same folder as your series (or movie) to be your own local details following long established “standards”. They act as a flat file database for metadata. It works with local assets like poster.jpg files to keep all that info together for you without relying on a service or GUI to manage it. It’s very manual process but also very much your own data your way.
Yeah. But for most shows this doesn’t matter much. TMDB is fairly complete when it comes to recent shows and TVDB is a larger database because it has existed longer, so it has had more contributions.
There are some shows that do not have the proper external links on TMDB defined to connect them to IMDB and TVDB, so that might limit what info Plex gets or what episode orders are available to use, but you can correct those on TMDB records and then after a few days refresh the metadata on Plex to see if you get any more info
You can’t change the synopsis source yourself. If it’s on TMDB that’s what you get.
With NFO’s, as much as looks like its moving backwards, it would be nice for Plex to fall back to them if it can’t match data from a provider.
My collection is at 165TB and I have so many edge cases of shows/ releases where these issues come up that I’d prefer using NFO and local data as a backstop and source of truth if the Plex DB ever gets fouled up.
It doesn’t even have to be “fouled up” it can just be different. That’s why Plex suggesting refreshing metadata on an entire library as part of fix is a bad idea. There’s been a few cases where I refresh the metadata on a show and whoops! the order of my files is all wrong now because the TVDB Absolute Order has been updated in some way since I added the series. Like adding a pilot episode special as episode 1 where it wasn’t listed before, and now all my episode files are one number off (X-Men: The Animated Series). If you’re not checking each show you never know what could have changed.
I added the TVDB plugin to Jellyfin and then arranged it as higher priority than TMDB for metadata for series. Then I can just set the shows to the same order as I’m using on Plex if I used DVD/Absolute.
