Thanks, I sincerely appreciate the response! I apologize if I come across as pushy, but your comments are actually very helpful and valuable.
As to me being the only one that asked, in fairness, I do want to point out that this thread was not created by me, and two other people have commented in this thread itself asking for the IDs. Others have responded on other threads or “liked” my post asking the question, and it has only been available for less than a week to the Plex Pass channel.
My assumption was just based on the wide usage of tools like Ombi, Tautulli, the Trakt plugin, PlexAPI, etc., which are all negatively impacted. The overall population of Plex users do not actually leverage these third party integrations or tools, but for the developers or users of said tools, it felt like things were in a bit of limbo.
We are definitely a vocal minority though, but we appreciate that Plex does not forget about us. I also do want to indicate that the new agent overall is significantly faster with some really cool new features. Additionally, the work done over the last couple of months has actually been staggering in scope and impact, so outstanding job to all of you. Keep up the excellent work, and hopefully, keep on listening to feedback on ways to improve.
Oops. Yeah, got you mixed up. Well, the agent is still in beta so there can still be lots of changes. Even once it’s out, you can then make a formal feature request and then we can actually count up the votes.
I would also like Plex to include the additional IDs in the API’s.
Currently this has hampered a lot of community applications that rely on the IMDb/tvdbid being in the guid identifier. Now the only way to work out what movie/show is to do a fuzzy match on the title and year, that’s not a great way to attempt to work out what is on the Plex server
The feature request would be for some public fields or an API that Plex will support other applications reading from in the future, right? There’s no reason you couldn’t make that request today.
I imagine the Plex folks have seen it already, considering this discussion. A feature request on the forum is a good way to gauge interest level, but it’s also not a democracy and doesn’t guarantee anything.
I would like the the IMDB ID and TVDB ID’s included in the new Matching scanners.
As far as asserting “So far you’re the only one that’s asked, so .”; please consider that not all your users know this forum exists nor have figured out why their experience with Plex has diminished (took me a while to figure out that “Upgrade Matching” broke functionality).
Ultimately, if one person points out a flaw in an “upgrade,” it’s likely they are representative of many more.
Please escalate the priority of having the new scanner be as capable as the “Legacy” scanner.
+1 for IMDB and TMDB id’s being included with the new agent. I have had to change my libraries back to the the legacy one but would like to use the new one and continue to use a few scripts I use also.
I don’t understand why they removed them to begin with… We have always used the IMDB ID in Plex, even with manual searches. All my media has it as part of the file name.
Quick easy ID of a movie… All my other media managers use the ID’s from all the major media DBs even if its just for display…
Like Plex to go two steps back and then one forward…
Technically, They were not removed The new agent and scanner are new and built from the ground up to have a single common guid for a movie. From an end user perspective I can see how it can look like it was removed.
We have had some discussion within the team about the feedback from our users of how important it is for their 3rd party tools and scripts to have a way to map the plex:// guid to an imdb or tmdb guid, and we are working on a solution
If you guys aren’t already reading Raymond Chen’s “The Old New Thing” you might enjoy it.
Windows is a pile of compatibility layers on top of APIs built on top of compatibility layers on top of previous APIs. That sounds negative, but it’s more like a miracle.
Plex has apparently also gotten big enough that you can’t change internal metadata without the entire ecosystem collapsing around you.
Thank you for that explanation and I am glad to hear that you are working on a solution.
I second the irritation on why you did not remove the id iteself, but access to it and focus around it. Nobody else in the universe does know about a unique Plex media ID. Therefore, no further metadata can be scraped, if Plex does not have it (or has info the user does not like as much as other info accessible). Movies that Plex cannot match are not matchable at all.
For example: since a few weeks, I am working on a “Awards & nominations” add-on. Plex does not have that info. How do I get it?
I prefer some other source for German movie summaries and ratings than you guys do. How do I get that?
Next thing you will do is disable the Plex Movie agent (legacy) and then I am prone with what you deliver whether I like it or not.
There is that feeling that you are loosing focus from individuality and localization.
This is a Plex product and Plex can do with it whatever you guys like.
But from the observer’s point of view, it was like “hey guys… look what we have, check out how fast that new agent is that we did - do you like this?” … “ah yes, all your metadata scrapers will stop working, all your 3rd party add-ons will no longer work”, but see, we made it the new standard agent anyway, tagged the old one “(legacy)”. We want to play nice and tell you from the start, that it will be gone sooner or later.
To tell you the truth… the speed of your new and shiny scanner is nice. If it keeps me from having the data I want, then how can Plex be the right product for me?
Nobody would care if you would just present somebody else’s media to us like Netflix does…But for their own media, people maybe want it more individual than that.
I have always the same argument with a German Plex guy here who keeps telling me that OFDB is not a good data source and that I don’t need it any longer.
I am opposing…
I like their critic’s rating better, they present the age rating more accurate than Plex does it (German rating system uses the “FSK …” label before the number. As I do have a lot of German movies, there’s even much more info on these kind of movies available on OFDB than it is on those global metadata sources like IMDB or TMDB.
There’s a whole ecosystem of third party tools using a GUI into Plex. The outside world is not working with unique Plex IDs. Please find a solution that keeps all of this alive.
I don’t want to emphasize that I feel this is a flawed design (no matter how speedy it is). You guys seem to have a view point that is so completely different than mine and I don’t want to be rude to you. Really.
Themoviedb, TMDB have data fields for all of their “competitors” IDs - open and available via search and index methods. All of them offer their own unique ID, too.
Please ask yourself… why? And even if your own use case does not realize how important it can be… allow others to decide for themselves.
That brings me to a completely different topic… how about your approach to different data sources with the new Plex agent? It’s not python any longer… Will you allow third party tool developers to have an add-on user interface to it?
I’m new to Plex but a veteran of movie collecting on my pc. I have my own movie manager software that I have created near 10 years ago and maintain and upgrade it every few weeks putting 1000’s of hours in on it since I created it. I only recently switched to plex server because of it’s polished look (ui), web streaming, and imdb support for importing movies.
However I have tested a few movies for importing to plex utilizing IMDb IDs and am very disappointed about its functionality. I have near 26,000 movies and posters all with 100.00% correct imdb ids assigned in the filenames.
In general… I agree with Plexs move to creating their own db with their own unique movie ids. Aggregating the metadata into a single db makes sense but…
I would very much like to see:
1: a PlexGUID2IMDbID.csv file be made available online with hourly or daily updates/additions.
2: an option setting for importing into plex, utilizing IMPLICIT matching with ID’s for either PlexGUID(if csv is available) or IMDbID or TMDbID… or all
As far as checking into the ability to create the PlexGUID2IMDbID lookup table, this is a simple query to your db to export to a file… 30 seconds or less to do, and easily automated with scripting. Failing this, I would be willing to start compiling this table myself and making it available online as a CSV file. But why would plex force this situation… just provide the lookup table voluntarily. TMDb supplies a TMDbID2IMDbID table(as a member), and Plex is utilizing multiple movie db for the metadata… just share a lookup table to make us happy… or assign the IMDb ID in the metadata xml’s.
And to those of you that say “filename match is 99% accurate and just use the fix match ui in plex software for the unmatched/wrong matched”… clearly you have small libraries… so why are you even in this labs thread? Do the match: 1% x 26,000… thats 260 movie files either unmatched or wrongly matched hidden in among 25,740 other movies? Do you want to look for the wrongly matched ones? Will take you a year to find them all.
.”; please consider that not all your users know this forum exists nor have figured out why their experience with Plex has diminished (took me a while to figure out that “Upgrade Matching” broke functionality).
The new agent and scanner are new and built from the ground up to have a single common guid for a movie. From an end user perspective I can see how it can look like it was removed.
