While the show was correctly matched and its metadata fetched with the older scanner/agent, the new agent has massive problems.
The show is correctly matched and cover arts as well as background for the show are fetched. But the cover arts for the seasons aren’t fetched and no title or synopsis for every episode isn’t fetched too.
This is another good example of a metadata mess. There are two entries per show on both TMDB and TVDB. One is called Mayday, the other Air Disasters. See here:
https://thetvdb.com/series/mayday
https://thetvdb.com/series/air-disasters-2011
And what’s on watch.plex.tv is called Air Disasters, but the URL is Air Disasters - Where to watch episodes online - Plex (Mayday). The metadata shows 22 seasons, so it’s pulling the data from the TMDB entry for Mayday, not Air Disasters.
A mess 
See this thread: New Plex TV Series agent detecting wrong series for "Mayday"
I agree that it’s a unnecessary mess and Plex should do much better, especially because they’re stealing the content from other databases (I highly doubt they call the API and just merge the data “on-the-fly”). Beside that, I think it’s really stupid to use data of TV Shows from a database made for Movies and data of Movies from a database made for TV Shows.
Maybe I should call Mercedes and ask them if they have a spare part for my BMW.
Well, The TV Show in question https://watch.plex.tv/show/mayday-2 is using the medata of https://thetvdb.com/series/mayday and https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/90-mayday and the TV Show in my local Plex is correctly matched with that show. It’s just not pulling the metadata.
The real mess comes from the various aliases the show has:
- Air Crash Investigation
- Air Emergency
- Air Disasters
- Mayday (Air Crash Investigation)
- The Accident Files
- Mayday: Special Report
- Air Crash Investigation: Special Report
EDIT: I just noticed that TheTVDB and TheMovieDB have a different sorting of at least season 17, because TheMovieDB uses a different air date. The same incorrect air date is used by Plex too (yet, we still can select between TheMovieDB and TheTVDB odering in the library settings).
What do you want me to do? Put the TVDB ID in the folder name?
Fun Fact: I switched to the older TheTVDB agent (which changed the scanner to the older “Plex Series Scanner” too) and now I do get artwork for each season as well as titles and synopsis for all episodes. And everything is in my library language German. It works as intended.
After a few hours I switched back to the “new and improved” (good joke) “Plex TV Series” agent (and made sure the scanner also changes to the new “Plex TV Series”). After a Metadata refresh for the existing episodes the episode title and synopsis went English again and after an additional library scan (again) no metadata for newly added seasons / episodes could be found.
Your consolidated database at watch.plex.tv is useless. Get rid of it. Or at least curate it.
@an3k FYI… its been mentioned many times on this forum that once you upgrade to the new modern scanner/agent its a one way move. You cannot switch back like you are doing. It will cause unknown complications and break things as the code is not compatible between the legacy and modern agents. Just letting you know …
It’s getting better and better. Compare Season 10 on the three databases:
TheTVDB lists six episodes:
- S10E01 - Cockpit Failure (Crossair Flight 3597)
- S10E02 - Who’s In Control?
- S10E03 - The Heathrow Enigma (British Airways Flight 38)
- S10E04 - Pilot Betrayed
- S10E05 - Dead Tired (Colgan Air Flight 3407)
- S10E06 - Hudson River Runway (US Airways Flight 1549)
TheMovieDB lists six episodes:
- S10E01 - Who’s in Control (Turkish Airlines Flight 1951)
- S10E02 - The Heathrow Enigma (British Airways Flight 38)
- S10E03 - Cockpit Failure (Crossair Flight 3597)
- S10E04 - Hudson River Runway (US Airways Flight 1549)
- S10E05 - Dead Tired (Colgan Air Flight 3407)
- S10E06 - Pilot Betrayed (Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751)
PlexDB lists ten episodes:
- S10E01 - Who’s in Control (Turkish Airlines Flight 1951)
- S10E02 - The Heathrow Enigma (British Airways Flight 38)
- S10E03 - Cockpit Failure (Crossair Flight 3597)
- S10E04 - Hudson River Runway (US Airways Flight 1549)
- S10E05 - Dead Tired (Colgan Air Flight 3407)
- S10E06 - Pilot Betrayed (Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751)
- S10E07 - Murder in the Skies
- S10E08 - River Runway
- S10E09 - Deadly Solution
- S10E10 - Afghan Nightmare
First of all, nobody cares about the TheMovieDB ordering; 1) they’re primarily for Movies and not TV Shows, 2) they only support one type of ordering, 3) because of 1 and 2 they often have incorrect ordering. Secondly but more importantly, where the funk did you got the four additional episodes from? I checked and the four episodes are from Season 16 …
TL;DR: This is just one example but it happened very often. Simply said PlexDB data is highly unreliable.
I wiped Plex off of my server and installed it from scratch, added the directory which contains tv shows and let it do its job. I get the exact same problems.
- incorrect ordering of the episodes
- No artwork for individual seasons
- English titles and synopsis for episodes (up to season 17)
- No titles or synopsis for episodes (season 17 and after)
I again wiped Plex off of my server and installed it from scratch, this time I used the older TheTVDB agent.
Surprise Surprise, everything works as intended.
- correct order of the episodes
- Artwork for individual seasons
- German titles and synopsis for episodes
- No missing metadata for some seasons
Take it from a fellow German, there’s no need to get so angry over this. One of the reasons the new agent/scanner combo exists is to reduce the number of API hits on both TVDB and TMDB significantly. So, from that perspective, it makes sense for Plex to host its own aggregated database. On the other hand, what often results in a mess is the combination of two individual databases into a single one. Add to that a preference and priority treatment for TMDB, and it can get real ugly.
I’m sure this will all get worked out eventually, but fact is that these two databases only exist in the first place due to the collaboration of many, many individuals. And when you have so many people with editing rights, things get messy. For Plex to curate their own database is really not feasible. Best thing you can do at this point is report the issues as you find them and be glad when users like @anon5074910 fix them for you.
A couple of things I always try first now:
-
Check if show exists on watch.plex.tv. If it doesn’t, Plex will still match the show, but not any individual episodes.
-
Try a fix match with both TVDB and TMDB ID. This can result in entirely different metadata, but one might match correctly while the other doesn’t. Again, this needs to be checked at an episode level, not the show level.
-
Change episode ordering for the show you’re having trouble with. I have come across cases where a show exists in all three databases, and yet having episode ordering set to my default TVDB would result in unmatched episodes, while changing over to TMDB would fix it. Just happened to me yesterday with “The Movies that Made Us”.
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There is definitely the need to get angry.
Plex Inc. has a CEO, a CFO, CTO and much more (all with a salary) yet they fail to implement the most simple things.
Plex’ ability to tonemap HDR to SDR? A user told them how to do it.
Plex is still is not able to use IPv6 for remote access, even with the “Enable server support for IPv6” option enabled. There’s a step-by-step process written here in the forums … but they just don’t implement it.
Ever tried copying a playlist to another user? Forget it.
And there is so much more.
Plex constantly adds features only a small group of people want / need, yet fails to implement features most users need.
Don’t get me wrong. Reducing the API hits on TheTVDB / TheMovieDB is nice BUT the way they implemented the new agent is just horrible.
They advertised it as “better in every way without disadvantages”, yet the agents only advantage is its much faster speed. But what do a few seconds matter if it has much worse or even incorrect data than the old agent?!
And nobody asked them to aggregate the two databases into one. They think it is better but as you can obviously see, it is not. It would be better if they would curate it (as in "manually fixing incorrect data caused by the conjunction) but if they don’t want to spend money on that the best solution would’ve been to just run a load-balancer for TheTVDB / TheMovieDB.
And no. I don’t have to check if my show exists on watch.plex.tv especially because I had my DB and this show years … YEARS … before they came up with the idea. They have to make sure their new DB is up to the task.
Also no, I don’t match a TV SHOW against a MOVIE DATABASE, mostly because TheMovieDB lacks most of the features of TheTVDB like alternate orderings and what not.
The main problem with Plex is that they want it to be a Swiss Army knife but can’t get it to be good at a single task. And I don’t consider playing or transcoding a videofile as a task - this is done by ffmpeg.
Playing Music is pure horror, I quit it long ago and started paying for Roon and Qobuz+Tidal.
I have a single playlist because playlist are horrible too. When you re-open one even if you just went to a different library a minute ago you’re back at the start of the playlist, no matter where you stopped.
But they added freaking video games into Plex. Hello, wake up. Get the basics working well, then you can add Gimmicks like Games or Stuff like that.
Or maybe make a deal with Disney+, Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime and all the other providers which allows us to implement their content into Plex seamlessly. This would be a really nice feature. Instead we get Free TV which is usually super cheap content the majority doesn’t want.
Sorry for the rant but before this ■■■■■■ new agent everything was working perfectly fine.
This is off-topic, but just to give you an idea of how much faster the new agent is (in my case with remote storage): I went from a full scan taking roughly 2.5 hours (large movie folder, not yet as optimized as I’d like it to be) down to less than five minutes. To me, that alone is worth the occasional headache with metadata management 
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Such a silly comment! While the name is TMDB its in name only. Do you also see IMDB as only a movie database for the same reason?
Regardless, TMDB have an excellent TV database now and while not prefect its getting better every day with their community.
I use TMDB as my default episode ordering with the modern plex scanner and with 600+ shows in my TV Library I’ve very little problems.
Let’s get back to specifics. This show has problems and I’m sure in time we’ll figure out how to get it working correctly with plex. I’ve not had time to investigate but have a few ideas on what might be causing problems (incorrect links, split show between different online sources…)!
FYI… @drzoidberg33. Making you aware of this thread incase there could be something in the plex backend with this show that needs investigation.
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And on the flipside, I’ve always used TVDB ordering, and with 3240 shows I’ve had an incredibly small amount of issues.
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It’s not off-topic but that’s not the point. I also don’t need an education on how much faster the new agent is. I know and already wrote that it is faster. But 1) it’s not really important how fast the agent is, the old one was fast enough (you don’t “match & fetch” a whole library so often) and 2) the new one has a much worse quality of the data it supplies.
If you only have occasional headaches, that’s fine. I have them with every single entry.
Okay, so had a few minutes to look into this today. As stated above there are two entries for this show (Mayday (TV Series 2003- ) — The Movie Database (TMDB)) and (Air Disasters (TV Series 2011- ) — The Movie Database (TMDB)). TVDB also has two enteries (Mayday - TheTVDB.com) and (Air Disasters - TheTVDB.com)
I believe the issue with (Air Disasters - Where to watch episodes online - Plex) is caused because IMDB only has 1 entry for this show at (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386950/). If you actually check both shows on TMDB the external id actually links off to this one show on IMDB. This is core issue.
To hopefully help I have deleted the IMDB external id for Air Disasters https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/60760-air-disasters/changes as it does not link to the correct place as its not on IMDB.
I hope this will help with this situation but we will need to wait 24/48 hours for the plex back-end system to pickup the changes.
NOTE: Over the coming day(s) when I have some more time I’ll add the episode external ids for both these shows to TVDB and add the IMDB ones for Mayday.
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TheMOVIEDB is specialized in MOVIES. TheTVDB is specialized in TV SHOWS. It’s that simple. Sure, both DBs can start adding data for TV Shows / Movies too but it will take a very long time until they are at least on the same level. And since both DBs aren’t even 100% done with their own area it’s impossible they are already better than the other DB. Especially because both are voluntary projects.
Have you ever heard “Cobbler, stick to your last.” - probably not.
You’re obviously too young to understand this and probably never have experienced it first hand yourself but TMDB has a bad TV database compared to TheTVDB. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re happy with TMDB for TV Shows then that is absolutely fine. But I Am not.
And what you don’t understand is that I’m not against TMDB but against being forced to use a database that is of much less quality. For many years (up until the new agent arrived) I didn’t had much problems, here and there incorrectly (or not yet) cached metadata but a quick post in the forums (or a metadata refresh the next day) and it got resolved. Yes, it took longer to fetch metadata but it didn’t prevented you from using the content and it didn’t made you think “everything’s fine”. When incorrect metadata is shown you think “everything’s fine” while it’s not. This is not how you run a database!
Yeah, back to the specifics: Again you can’t comprehend the problem. It’s not about “in time we’ll figure out how to get it working correctly”. It’s not a mystery that needs to get solved. It’s in plain sight that Plex funked up when they stole the data from TheTVDB, TheMovieDB and IMDB and aggregated it. We already knew for many years how to get this show working PERFECTLY in Plex.
We have agreements with these sites to use their data. Nothing is being stolen here.
I am just back from holiday, I’ll start looking into this show to see what’s going on. It is quite confusing as there is a different show called “Air Disasters” which isn’t the one you’re talking about but an alias of “Mayday”. I’ll create some tests to see what’s going on.
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Good
Welcome back and thank you. I agree, the “dozens of names” of the show aren’t helping. At least they didn’t rename the show in the middle of it (at least not the German title).
