I don’t know how Plex identifies the movies and shows but this is a good example that shows that IMDB isn’t “complete” enough to be automatically trusted as well as TheMovieDB isn’t “accurate” enough to be automatically trusted.
The next problem is: What sort order is being used? TheMovieDB for example uses the … and that’s a cute joke … Australian air date (at least for season 10). Sure, TheTVDB uses the air date too but at least the one from the origin country of a show (in this case: Canada). AFAIK IMDB uses the US air date.
How does this help? Is Plex asking IMDB and then from there other DBs?
The new modern agent/scanner is a consolidation of metadata. It does not just get information from one place. I’m open to correction on this but from what I understand pretty much everything starts with IMDB ids and then links out to TMDB and TVDB. There is likely some exceptions to this but at a high level this how I think of it.
This is why it was the first thing I checked. On TMDB as I suspected the top level show external id stored there might be wrong, which I confirmed. As IMDB does not have a entry for Air Disasters and the link from TMDB for Air Disasters went to Mayday which most likely caused a mess. @drzoidberg33 can confirm or add to this once he has done his tests.
Anyhow, to add to that one of the ways its links these together is via these external ids stored in TMDB. These ids from TMDB to IMDB and TVDB respectively. This can be at the top level show as well as individual episodes.
Regardless , my motivation here is 1) nothing more than trying to help and 2) hoping to improve the data over at TMDB which is why I’m happy to help with these edits. I don’t even have this show in my plex library
This is now complete for both Air Disasters and Mayday. Some of episode specific ids where wrong and others where missing. I also updated the summary for all season of Air Disasters as they where missing from TMDB.
Lets see when this all replicates to the plex back-end cache metadata servers if it helps. If not then lets see what else we can do!
After doing a Metadata refresh today Plex was able to catch cover art for each season and German titles and synopsis for each episode. And the sort order is also correct.
@drzoidberg33 Was there something broken you guys had to fix or was it simply the incorrect ids over at themoviedb / missing ids at thetvdb?
EDIT: I just noticed that Plex doesn’t pull all artwork. For most seasons artwork is pulled from TheMovieDB and TheTVDB but for a few it only pulled from TheTVDB. Is that an issue with PlexDB or my local Plex server?
