Multiple shows are combined, despite date clues provided

[pwinn]

Doctor Who (1963) and Doctor Who (2005) keep being collapsed/confused

I've spent quite a while on this, and it's frustrating. I object to the idea of renaming my files to satisfy Plex, given that this file structure has made XBMC happy for a long time. I tweaked my 'Plex Series Scanner.py' to allow for my SEE naming convention.

Still, in the course of trying to figure this out, I've also renamed my folders and files, to no avail.

Consider:

Doctor Who (1963)/<br />
-- Doctor Who (1963) - Series 01 (1963)/<br />
  -- Doctor Who (1963) - 101 - An Unearthly Child.avi<br />
  -- Doctor Who (1963) - 102 - The Cave of Skulls.avi<br />
etc<br />
<br />
Doctor Who (2005)/<br />
-- Doctor Who (2005) - Series 1 (2005)/<br />
  -- Doctor Who (2005) - 101 - Rose.avi<br />
  -- Doctor Who (2005) - 102 - The End of the World.avi<br />
etc<br />

On initial scan, Plex will create two entries in the list, for each of the two shows, but as it analyzes the files, it collapses the two shows into one, which means that either 'Rose' replaces 'An Unearthly Child' or vice-versa.

I've tried everything I can think of, but I can't seem to keep the shows from combining.

This alone is easily enough to get me to drop Plex.

P.S. I've prepended this line to my episode_regexps:

'(?P<season>[0-9]{1,2})(?P<ep>[0-9]{2})([-]?(?P<secondEp>[0-9]{2}))?([ - ](?P<title>.+)(\..+)?$)?',

[pwinn]

No help, eh?



If one plans to hold the line at “just name your files properly,” it might do well for one to have some clue about how to name one’s files to avoid a nightmare like this.

[pwinn]

I’ve spent a few hours digging through Python code and trying things with freshly-created sections, and here’s what I’ve found:



There is no way at all to keep this from happening. That is, the original ‘Doctor Who’ series will always and forever be matched with ‘Doctor Who (2005)’ by the thetvdb query, every time, no matter what, no way around it.



So my solution was to start with neither show in the section, then first add the original show by itself, where it of course matched the wrong show. Then I manually overrode the mismatch, and let all the media analysis finish before adding the new show, which of course matched the same show, which is right this time.



End result: both shows with the right metadata.



I poked at the search api a bit, but I couldn’t figure out how to get a higher metadata score for the show without the date attached, so no naming scheme in the world would help.

[SamDavies01]

I am experiencing the same problem with Doctor Who. I have tried to all sorts of renames, but Plex does not seem to recognize the episodes. For example, it recognizes S01E01 as “An Unearthly Child”, does the same for E02, E03, E04, but continues to do so for E05 (The Dead Planet, or The Daleks P1). So super annoying…

[EtherMan]

This isnt about the scanner, but rather the metadata agents. If it initially does it correctly, and only during metadata fetching does it combine, then it’s because the metadata agents, sets them to be the same. This is usually caused by having an incorrect matching done. Which in this case, is really caused by TheTVDB thinking Doctor Who (2005) is a diffrent TV series from the 63 one even though it isnt. First season of 2005, is actually officially, the 27th season. But anyway. The reason you’re getting an incorrect match is because the way you’re providing date information is incorrect. Information within paranthesis, is basicly just ignored entirely rather than taken as date information. So dont use paranthesis for that, but rather use “Doctor Who 1963” as the foldername of the series, and it will correctly match it to the original Doctor Who series on TheTVDB.

[mgsmith.nj]

A BIG thank you to @EtherMan for the tip on "Doctor Who 1963" syntax. I had tried a whole bunch of different naming conventions, but none worked. It kept matching to something called "The Season" and even "Game of Thrones". The working directory structure/naming convention is as follows:

M:\Doctor Who\Series\Doctor Who 1963
    \Season 1
        \Doctor Who 1963 - S01E01 - 100,000 BC (An Unearthly Child).mkv
        \Doctor Who 1963 - S01E02 - 100,000 BC (The Cave of Skulls).mkv
        \Doctor Who 1963 - S01E03 - 100,000 BC (The Forest of Fear).mkv

The key was setting "M:\Doctor Who\Series" as the root folder for the "TV" library. I originally had "M:\Doctor Who\Series\Doctor Who 1963\" as the root folder, but it wasn't recognizing that even though I had the files named accordingly.

Here's how my library looks now!