I found a chow named “Ancient Aliens: Special Presentation”, which is a collection of compilation episodes of that series. Both TheTVdb (451296) and TheMovieDb (237984) recognize the show, and both show episode titles. And I mean titles that are NOT just “Episode N”, which is all that Plex will show for this series.
I know that I can manually go in and modify every single episode title, but I should not need to do that.
I use my Windows Plex client to “Refresh Metadata” on the series and, after several seconds, I see the “spinny thing” that usually indicates something is being done by the server, first over the series poster, then over each of the two season posters, one at a time, in turn. Then when I check, all of the titles are still “Episode N” instead of the titles listed by either tvdb or tmdb.
Is there any way to force this to work, or just to override the library default setting and have Plex get the titles directly from the file’s metadata, which have the correct titles? Or is this just some sort of bug in Plex or a bias by the Plex developers against silly documentaries?
Whatever it is, it is definitely a little annoying and makes me wonder how many other shows I have not noticed are never getting correct episode titles. I attached the server logs and, just before I collected the logs and posted this I had re-tried to have the show’s metadata refreshed (that would be something like 5:35pm EST in the logs).
All my settings specify English.
The files have embedded titles (as stated in my OP). For the past couple years, I’ve been very careful to ensure that all my TV Show and Movie files have embedded metadata.
Also, FWIW, the program I use for metadata tagging also produces .plexmatch files, like this one that I used for this particular show:
Title: Ancient Aliens Special Presentation
Season: 1
Year: 2022
tmdbid: 237984
I cannot find that information in your first post. You only state that the show has episode titles on the metadata websites TMDB/TVDB.
I am referring to embedded meta tags in your video files. (Plex will only use embedded metadata from mp4/m4v files.)
Your server logs don’t contain “debug” information and thus don’t show nearly enough detail information to diagnose this issue.
I consider it not a good thing to do this by default, as it slows down library scans.
Is there any way to force this to work, or just to override the library default setting and have Plex get the titles directly from the file’s metadata, which have the correct titles?
Italics added to emphasize what I think says that the title metadata is in the media files. All of my files are .MP4
When I started this post, there’s a note that states something to the effect, “If you are posting server logs, make sure that you have debug loggingdisabled in order to avoid posting too much information” or something to that effect.
But…
If I can find where to turn on the debug logging info, I will do that, ask Plex to refresh the show’s metadata again and re-post the logs.
Sorry, my bad on the verbose/debug thing. I found the setting to enable debug logging under general settings instead under troubleshooting which I consider an alternate word for debugging. The last thing I requested was the metadata refresh of the Ancient Aliens show. However, the server was also processing a few new movie files for credits and thumbnails, just in case you notice that stuff. Plex Media Server Logs_2024-11-20_16-56-59.zip (4.2 MB)
If something in the logs shows that the meta data format is incorrect, could you provide a link to the documentation for the correct format for TV show (and Movie) metadata? The program I’m using (MetaX) thinks it is correct, but I’ll send the reference links to the developer to see if he is interested in fixing his product.
Well, it took a few weeks, but the episode titles and descriptions finally appeared. I don’t know if something was fixed, or of my Plex server finally woke up or what, but to seems to have finally taken care of itself.
