A few months ago we upgraded our movie scanning and matching inside PMS leveraging our own cloud metadata provider. Since then we’ve been working on giving TV shows/series the same treatment, and while there are still a few important things we still need to address, the core functionality is there and we would like to get it into more hands so we have the opportunity to test things out a wider variety of setups.
WARNING: Ensure you have a database backup before proceeding. While we have taken care to ensure no major issues, it is a good precaution to ensure you backup your database before you install this build.
Download the preview PMS version 1.22.0 (links below)
Use the custom bundled web app at http://localhost:32400/web(This now shows a preview of TV shows in fix match)
Create a new test TV library using the “Plex TV Series (BETA)” Agent. Note: While you can currently upgrade an existing library using one of the legacy agents to use the new agent it is recommended that during the preview that you create a completely separate library for testing.
Tip: You can create a new TV library that points to the same folders as your existing library. Which may make it easier to compare.
You may also want to disable visibility on Home screen and search so your home screen Recently Added does not get populated with content from the test library
Once TV have scanned into the library please check the following;
Does the new TV scanner pick up all your files?
Are your shows and their episodes getting matched correctly?
Is metadata like posters, summaries, release dates, etc. all loading as expected?
If you can compare the library with an existing one, do the show counts match between them?
Any observations on the speed of the process; are you experiencing any major slowdowns at any point?
Does Fix Match work as expected?
Please report any crashes or anything out of the ordinary.
Note: These libraries should be used for testing purposes only. As we will be improving this feature along the way, there is no guarantee of future/backward compatibility etc.
What are some of the things still being worked on and/or known issues?
IMDB ratings are currently only supported at the show level.
Localization is limited to shows and episodes (season titles and summaries are only available in English currently). Improvements to this is ongoing.
What if my TV show/series matched incorrectly?
If you come across something that we matched incorrectly, please use the “Fix Match” option in the dropdown which will help improve future matching al let us know what the correct match for that item is.
What if my TV show/series matched but has bad metadata?
This should be rare but if it happens please reply to this thread and let us know in detail what is wrong with the metadata eg; the poster is in the wrong language, the synopsis is missing etc.
What if my TV show/series didn’t match at all?
This should also be rare if your filenames follow our naming guide, but if it does happen please reply to this thread with what the tv show/series should have matched to and the full filename.
Download Links
These links are no longer available as preview testing has concluded. Please use the public release channels.
Found an interesting bug. When creating a library, it normally defaults in my case to “English”. After I select the library location and change the movie agent and click on “Save Changes” it says “Cannot save changes”. When I look in the console this is what I saw:
Library: Couldn’t create section: ‘language’ is missing or invalid
The workaround for this was to select the library location and THEN change the library language to whatever next option there was. Create the library and change the language back to English.
Actually I just went back and checked and the new TV agent had not been selected. It looks like when this error occurs, it immediately changes the agent back tot he default Plex Series Scanner and TheTVDB.
This is on Windows 10 Pro 20H2 with PMS 1.21.2.3829
Please use the bundled web app (i.e. http://127.0.0.1:32400/web) for testing, it will default to the new agent for new TV libraries and you won’t have this issue.
@chrisallen@drzoidberg33 thanks, I should have some time over the upcoming holidays to give this a whirl. I do have couple of initial questions/comments which I could not see called out above:
With the Movie agent we know it consolidated from multiple online sources and uses that information to build its plex meta data. Will this be the same for the updated TV Agent ?
The metadata for episode tag directors has been broke for well over a year now (I’ve a thread on the issue). Anyhow, will this be fixed with the new TV agent ?
I see IMDB rating are currently only support ? Will TMDB rating be supported when its rolled out ?
How will cast avatars will be handled ? Will they be show specific like how TVDB do it or will it use generic clean avatars ? (please say generic)
If avatars are generic, will the same avatar be shared between Movie and TV Libraries ? One of the major long standing short-fail with the current avatars is that its dependant on what metadata was refreshed last and thus that will control what avatar displays across all libraries.
What I’m actually hoping will happen with casts is that the list of the cast members is built from multiple online sources (TVDB, TMDB, IMDB etc…) but that the avatars are then used from whatever back-end plex cache servers uses for the movie agent so its consistent across all our libraries.
Looking forward to see this in action so thanks for providing this.
We plan to support as many features from the movie side that make sense for TV, the nfo is part of that. This will only come online when local metadata support is added in which will be probably be early next year. Right now the testing focus is on scanning and matching without having local metadata.
Director tags on episodes do work on the new agent (as long as the information is available from one of the sources).
Full support for TMBD and TVDB ratings exists already, you can chose which one to use in the advanced settings like for movies. IMDB ratings are available as an option but currently only work for shows and not episodes.
I was bitching about this yesterday myself. We’ll do our best to make sure that the avatars are pictures of real people, that means we’ll likely be using TMDB for the most part and we’ll fall back to TVDB when nothing else is available.
Ye, this has been a “bug” in PMS for a while - in the new world with both TV and Movies using our data the images should all be consistent but if you have libraries using mixed agents you’ll still get that crossover until I get to addressing that issue in PMS.
We’re currently using IMDB exclusively for the show cast list but plan to use theTVDB also (as their data is quite good, except for the images) but we’re waiting for the v4 api of theirs to be ready (this is blocking other improvements using theTVDB too).
Thanks for taking the time to test this out, your feedback does really help us improve things.
Thanks – field has always been available within plex itself but has never been populated even when it exits in the source so would be good to get for those of us who really like the metadata on servers.
Yay, exciting times! My first impressions are very positive.
The “Updating Metadata” Activity indicator is welcomed!
Very good matching overall.
A few things that were in TVDB but shouldn’t have been don’t match. That’s OK because they shouldn’t have been in TVDB in the first place.
Great Show & Very good Season posters
Will it be possible to embed ID numbers in show directory names, like the Plex Movie Scanner? {tvdb-####}, {tt#######}, etc.
I’m having an odd experience with Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger (2018). When the Show folder name includes the year, I get blank metadata, poor posters, and this:
I wonder if this is because IMDB has the title as Cloak & Dagger, while both TVDB and TMDB have it as Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger. IMDB does have Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger as an alternative title, though.
The only gripe I have here is with animated shows. I would much prefer having the real person’s avatar instead of one of an animated character. We could possibly do something fancy here but for now we’ll likely try and keep it simple.
