Issues matching series with TheTVDB agent, special characters and title aliases

[danielv1]

Server Version#: 4.34.3 (docker :latest)
Player Version#: https://app.plex.tv/desktop

I am reorganizing my media and decided to start from scratch with my library.

20% of my files are not getting a match. I am having a very VERY hard time trying to get them to match to their respective show. Most of these are series have special characters in the title like exclamation marks, question marks, semicolons… Even going to thetvdb.com to manually copy the title they have for the show leaves me with “No match found.”.

Some examples:
Trying to match for “Princess Connect! Re:Dive” which is an exact copy of the title on https://thetvdb.com/series/princess-connect-redive:
Princess Connect! Re:Dive == No matches found.
Princess Connect Re:Dive == No matches found.
Princess Connect Re Dive == No matches found.
Princess Connect == (Princess Connect! Re:Dive 98% match)

Next example, my directory is called:
/Anime/The Helpful Fox Senko-san

By itself plex automatically strips special characters and starts searching for: The Helpful Fox Senko San which gives me No matches found. eventhough there is a single result on thetvdb.com website that is a perfect match.
Following the logic that helped me with Princess Connect, I strip everything starting at a special character. “The Helpful Fox Senko” results with No matches found. though, but on thetvdb.com it’s a perfect matching search for the show.

There is something going obviously wrong with the logic that checks if it’s a match or not when special characters are involved.

All of my shows are in perfectly named folders, and if I search for their folder name it’s always the first result on thetvdb.com, But when special characters are involved it messes up the agent. Also for 20% of my media it’s an alias to the entry on thetvdb. thetvdb returns a perfect match, yet plex won’t match to it. why doesn’t the agent support aliases? They exist for a reason.

Searching for “Grand Blue” leaves you with No matches found. The title of the show on TheTVDB is “Grand Blue Dreaming” with “Grand Blue” as an alias. That’s a 100% match right there on that alias! But also, If “Princess Connect” is a 98% match for “Princess Connect! Re:Dive”, then with what logic does “Grand Blue” leave you with No matches found. when the first entry is “Grand Blue Dreaming”.

Greetings,

Someone who helped you set up your network in our datacenter that we sponsor for you

[anon18523487]

Can you provide the actual filenames, not just the folder name?

Edit - Searching from their website is not the same as searching using their API.

[danielv1]

Hey thanks for the reply

Do you want the filenames for all the episodes? The problems I’m facing is related to matching a folder to a TV show. It was my understanding that to match folder to a show that plex does a search based on the folder name (Or my custom search like I did above)

I don’t have issues matching episode files to their specific episode numbers, just the show itself. All my episodes have S01E01 , S01E02 in them etc.

edit: 20% of my files are not getting a match. should have been 20% of my folders are not getting a match. in my first post

[JuiceWSA]

Show us your file names.

[danielv1]

There you go.

and again, TheTVDB agent has trouble matching the folder to a show, not a file to an episode.

[anon18523487]

Plex matches the episode which then identifies the show. It does not use the folder name to identify the show first. The folder name is used as a backup incase the show can’t be identified from the episode.

Your naming looks fine. I’ll have to test to see if those names match.

[TeknoJunky]

keep in mind, many anime may split ‘seasons’ off as separate ‘shows’, while tvdb tends to keep them all one show with multiple seasons.

there is an anime ‘agent’ plugin in the forums that connects to an anime specific metadata provider that might be more useful to you.

[anon18523487]

I tried the Helpful Fox and I get a match score of 63. I think that score is too low to be considered an automatic match. You should be able to do a manual match, which did work for me.

[pshanew]

I just tested both series on my Windows test server (my Linux VM isn’t up at the moment) with the following structure and both were automatically matched, and metadata pulled:

TV\
     Princess Connect! Re Dive (2020)\
          Season 01\
               Princess Connect! Re Dive (2020) - S01E01.mkv
     The Helpful Fox Senko-san (2019)\
          Season 01\
               The Helpful Fox Senko-san (2019) - S01E01.mkv

Both had a score of 100. Perhaps including the year is helpful in this case? And instead of changing the semi-colon to a hyphen, leave it out?

Edit:
I tested on my Linux PMS VM and the results were the same.

[anon18523487]

Confirmed, adding the year got it to auto-match.

[Meowser]

Strangely I can’t get Senko-San to match. Named the same as suggested using the year too.

E.g. The Helpful Fox Senko-san (2019)\Season 01\The Helpful Fox Senko-san (2019) - S01E01.mkv

I have tried removing from the library, emptying the trash, re-adding, but still no results found.

I am using Plex on Windows. Version 1.19.5.3112.

Any ideas?

[danielv1]

Hey Meowser,

The search function is ■■■■. You tell it to manually search for X and it still takes the filename into account. I worked around this failure of a searchmethod by going to thetvdb.com, search for the series, copying the thetvdb.com Series ID and pasting that in the search field when you do a manual search for the match.

Fixed around 10 series like this that were not able to find a match through the manual search method.

[Meowser]

Thanks danielv1, that got me to be able to match it.

I can’t believe the search function is so bad though. It also is crazy that other people claimed the formatting I used to get an auto-match but mine was finding nothing.

Thanks again!