In the interest of transparency, can we have the name of the " new primary metadata source for images" which is referred to in this article?
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Is this why I have been having issues with one of my Nvidia Shield servers? It’s been asking me to update libraries to generic titles and then the match feature has nothing inside when I click on it. It’s only until I change the agent back to TVDB or something like that where I get the option to match for the correct metadata.
Or it might be this:
Good thing is it looks like it’s fixed in the 1.40 beta
Good luck
Chris
Yeah, I wanna know the source.
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I’m curious about this source change too since Plex was already pulling from 2 popular and established community managed sources (and we knew who they were). Them not saying who it is in the notice makes me worry Plex is moving to a private vendor for this as part of their new VOD deals. Which isn’t necessarily a bad function, just would be removing even more of the community legacy of Plex as a product which would be disappointing and could be another sign of Plex’s enshittification.
That seems like a whole different mess that likely isn’t from this change or the agent bugs that were fixed in 1.40… probably worth starting a dedicated thread to sort that out. 
It’s Gracenote. As stated in the announcement you can still manually edit and pick other posters if you don’t like whatever is automatically chosen from Gracenote which are still gotten from the existing sources but those won’t be primary.
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Thanks @BigWheel, I appreciate it; didn’t think anything nefarious was happening but it’s nice to know these details as plex server admin.
Gracenote has been around a long time; started back in the olden times as a community run music ID service for CD ripping - similar to MusicBrainz and Picard today - then became a private company for business services. They’re a pretty big player so will likely be a reliable source for metadata as a business partner for Plex and will probably solve some of the issues that crop up using community based metadata sources.
Unfortunately it does remove a factor of that community aspect of Plex. I was contributing to TMDB as part of supporting Plex metadata as I’m sure other Plex server admins were doing as well (similar to when I used to contribute to Gracenote when ripping CDs). For some that might matter, for others it might not. I assume as long as it works well it won’t matter to the majority of Plex users and we can still set our own custom artwork of course.
I’m assuming the artwork for movies is just the first step in a broader adoption overall so a quick follow up question - which likely doesn’t have an answer this early in the game but wanted to ask: Gracenote is primarily known for it’s music matching\metadata, will it replace MusicBrainz as metadata source for music eventually?
I’m not aware of any plans/discussions to move away from MusicBrainz
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That feels like a huge step backwards from ThemovieDB. Do you know why this change was made?
Edit: Never mind, I get it now. It’s for legal reasons.
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It is a huge step back. New posters are here and they’re awful: The new posters are almost entirely worse. : PleX
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The new posters are awful. Genuinely terrible. I’m extremely happy I have my library backed up every couple days so that I can restore to a point before this change happened and then disable automatic metadata refreshes.
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I found a couple that used posters with marketing copy and actor names on them and those I definitely think are crap - and changed them; others were mostly just preference on if considered good or bad posters.
Since the UI\UX for watched status changed I’ve been picking posters with titles at the bottom or middle more often so that the titles aren’t covered by that annoying box\green check overlay as well.
All the posters seemed to be good image quality though so I thought that was a benefit.
None of the posters I had set manually changed and that was my only big concern.
I did notice that if it’s using a “new” default poster, that in the UI of selecting a poster it’s not the first one in the list anymore. In the past, the first one in the list\display was the default so that threw me off a bit seeing the selected poster in the middle or end of the list.
Overall I only had to “adjust” about 10 posters out of ~1000.
Edit: It might be nice to have a guide or pre-built form to report bad posters for specific reasons that Plex would consider reasonable; wrong poster, marketing copy, bad resolution, etc
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This is a good idea
I personally use local artwork assets so this change (thankfully) does not effect me much. However, the one area it does is the Known For within Discover Credits. As this does not use my curated artwork and instead uses the plex artwork its a good gauge to see how things have changed/improved.
I would say overall the default plex artwork looks better than it was before and this change should remove the issues plex have had with copyright takedown requests.
However, like everything there are some exceptions and main one as I see it is artwork containing text for the leading cast members. Some examples are https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/movie/dogville, https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/movie/fantastic-four-2015 and https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/movie/the-hitmans-bodyguard but there are others.
For me, these are bad posters and do not have a clean professional look. All three have much better default posters at tmdb. Overtime this may improve, lets see.
BTW… question to the plex team: In the past we could influence the default artwork by up and down voting at tmdb. With the move to this new provider is there a way for the community to influence change ?
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I will say that the background/fanart pictures of the movies seems to have been generally improved with this change.
Tmdb always had kind of wonky backgrounds, usually a shot from the movie. Mostly I did not like them. The backgrounds from Gracenote seem to have more of an official/promotional feel to them. I like that better, personally.
They are however lower resolution, or at least they look like they are, but it’s not that big of a deal. And further, the backgrounds now much more often has text on them. This was not the case with tmdb because they would be marked as language: none for Plex to consider them.
Also, is it just me or does some movies get new Titles from this change? Because I have refreshed some movies that both change the poster to a different name, and the Title of the movie changes at the same time. Could be a coincidence I suppose but it doesn’t seem like it.
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Found it’s very hit or miss for me. Many, particularly older movies (80s and 90s and older), are just the cropped poster and some seem like weird options that you have to wonder if they are for the right movie.
Deadpool 2 is using the “once upon a deadpool” artwork with Fred Savage for example.
Most seem to be the promotional artwork used on the poster simply reformatted for landscape (or as I said, just the poster cropped randomly to fit) and personally I don’t like that because I want the poster and the background to be different. And the cropping looking like crap is no good.
TMDB and TVDB handled that better. I’m really not that picky about the backgrounds, but I’m definitely having to fix backgrounds more often than posters now (and having to go back and fix the “defaults” being made worse) and that’s more time consuming. Luckily, still the ones I manually selected or set are staying put but because TMDB\TVDB did a decent job I often left them at defaults so… just a bit annoying to go back to fix now.
Edit: there’s also not an easy way to “scan” through backgrounds other than creating a new row on a hub or using PlexDash to see them one at a time (can set PlexDash to browse artwork by background but it’s still just swiping past all of the movies in single images).
Sorry there is not.
I haven’t had the chance to try out how effective Gracenote’s posters are. If they indeed don’t perform well as you’ve described, I suggest proposing to Plex to introduce a feature for default settings selection. Similar to how you can choose the default Episode ordering for TV show libraries, either TMDB or TVDB, users should be able to pick a default source for posters, like Gracenote or TMDB. This way, users can opt for TMDB as the default source while adding new sources.
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Suspected as much but thanks for the confirmation.
I really like that suggestion as it currently stands I don’t want to refresh my libraries metadata.
Even though it would be nice to keep movie rating etc up to date without mucking with the artwork.
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