While cleaning up my TV show library I noticed that I had some duplicate and misplaces files for 'Allo 'Allo (1982). I cleaned up the files on disk to match the DVD order on TheTVDB, set the show to use that order and trigger a rescan + metadata refresh.
However, Plex refuses to actually use the TheTVDB dvd order for the show or at least gets confused with the metadata. For the first season, the E01 and E02 are shown with the same title, different descriptions [ger vs. eng], different ratings but with the correct dates (matching TheTVDB). S08 also starts with an episode that is considered a special outside of the dvd order. The date and (eng) description match the TheTVDB data for that episode, but the title is completely wrong in German (seems to be to the title of S01E02?). I don’t actually know where the German title for the episode comes from, since neither TheTVDB nor TMDB have German metadata for that episode.
I have to admit that this somewhat frustrating to debug, since Plex seems to end up using some wild mix of metadata that makes no sense and it is completely unclear (to me) how it ends up there. Is there any way to get a more direct look at the data the Plex Series agent uses?
Verify that “prefer local metadata” is OFF, if your files are in mp4/m4v format.
Alternatively, ensure that they don’t contain any embedded meta tags.
The Refresh Metadata of the whole series.
Did all that, no change. But I also tried re-ordering files to match the aired order and the metadata issues persist. The English descriptions match those on TheTVDB but the German episode titles are nonsense (library is German).
So this seems to just be an issue with the metadata for these episodes, not the order. Looking at the episodes on watch.plex.tv with the site set to German shows the same incorrect titles. Is there any way to correct this? Something similar to the edit functionality on TheTVDB or TMDB (neither of which has those German titles)?
Several factors are colluding here:
TMDB doesn’t have episode descriptions in German after S01E01.
TheTVDB does have them in German, however, it appears that someone put in German descriptions which are fitting for the episode number which were used in German TV at some point, but these don’t suit the English original episode numbers which are used on TheTVDB.
There also appears to be some confusion about the Pilot episode, which is appearing as a Special (i.e. in season 00) on TheTVDB, but somehow its description is close to one of the German descriptions in Season 1 on TheTVDB.
On IMDb, the Pilot is shown as episode 0 of season 1 instead.
This whole messup isn’t easy to untangle and Plex cannot help much with it. Plex merely uses the data from the above sources, and tries to combine them to fill in gaps from the other sources.
You could either set the series to English language and live with that.
Or you could take it upon yourself to enter correct German episode descriptions over on TMDB for each episode, which do correspond to the English versions and episode titles of each episode number. This is the best approach for Plex, because it uses TMDB as its primary source.
This is unfortunately not the only series where I’ve seen such deviating episode information between the original English and the German metadata.
