Server Version#: 1.20.0.3125
I had two questions about how the new agent is working
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For the below point, I was using a third party tool - https://github.com/mynttt/UpdateTool . It no longer works with the new agent, similar to many other third party tools and integrations like the Trakt plugin. The main reason is that the guid of any movie no longer contains an ID from a metadata provider like IMDB/TMDB/Trakt. That means that these tools have no way of knowing how to match the movie. Is there any workaround or way to pull this info using the new agent since it is obviously something that Plex does know? This would create a major hurdle on developing any sort of script or software to interact with Plex. An example is that my existing collection summaries were all deleted during the library upgrade. Since I do not want to recreate them (which I know would allow Plex to pull those summaries), I wanted to write a simple script to pull them from TMDB. This task now seems impossible without any way to precisely identify the movies programmatically.
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I always had issues with stale IMDb Ratings. A good example is when a new movie is released, the ratings can swing dramatically (Palm Springs went from a 6.9 to a 7.7 to 7.5). I was curious if this new agent handles this in any sophisticated way, or would I be forced to refresh metadata to keep the ratings up to date?
I ran a script to compare the ratings from the new agent vs the IMDb dataset. I had to do this by abusing the “match” function of Plex, where I basically iterated through each movie and matched against the old IMDb agent to pull the guid. It was incredibly slow (roughly 10 hours for 2000 movies), so it is not an actual solution. I have not found any other way to get the IMDb ID from the movie using the new agent.
The results were promising. The agent was just released, so obviously they may have just updated the ratings in their crowdsourced platform, but outside of a few cases where the matching was not accurate, the difference in scores was almost always correct (like over 80%). The few cases where it differed, it differed by an absolute value of 0.1. I did not see any cases above this difference that could not be attributed to a wrong match.
EDIT: After doing some testing, it seems that Plex’s new metadata server updates the IMDb ratings on a 7 day rolling period based on the last update. It will grab RT if there is not votes (or any votes) initially from IMDb, and likewise grab TMDB if there is not enough reviews in RT/it is not available. The nice thing is that these are swapped (TMDB > RT > IMDB) as soon as the data becomes available. There are 5 movies in my collection that do not have any IMDb rating, and I have opened a separate thread for that.
