Since it now is clear that Plex is moving to the new Plex TV Series agent only (and it’s out of BETA) and thus removing the possibility for us end users to change and add metadata on the agent side, we really need some sort of support topic for this.
I suggest that someone from Plex that has access to the new PTVS agent and can make changes creates a pinned support topic where we can request changes be made.
As of now there is just no way of knowing exactly where to go to make changes and what metadata that is going to be fetched by PTVS, or when. There are plenty of examples where PTVS chooses metadata of lesser quality over better ones, and we can’t do anything about it. Since PTVS is fetching from TVDB, TMDB and IMDB it’s hard to know what takes present over the other.
This support topic is probably going to be very demanding in the beginning, so I hope Plex will step up here since they removed our possibility to choose. Perhaps they should create some kind of ticket system?
Don’t get me wrong here, the new PTVS agent is very good in many ways and is probably perfect for people who don’t have any clue where the metadata comes from. But we who are the people that actually spend time adding metadata to the agents feel kind of left out here.
This is my biggest concern, because sometimes it’s as big as shows getting picked up under the wrong name and therefore not really having an episode order (or it being incorrect) on other sources, however I somehow doubt that we’ll get a ticketing system regarding this new metadata agent given how it has been talked about and portrayed by staff.
I just hope the old agents / custom agent support isn’t leaving any time soon. Traditionally (despite many community problems), TheTVDB remains the best source of most data, yet the new agent clearly picks alternate data in certain circumstances without an understandable reason.
I’ve just come across a particular instance of this issue.
The Plex Media TV Scanner seems to use the Plex database itself and it has chosen to use the “Specials” information from TheMovieDB:
whereas the TVDB actually has the full list of “Specials” from the immense Dark Shadows DVD Collection, which is what I used for my Episode organization/file naming:
My TV Shows library is using the Plex TV Show Scanner and there is no way for you to specify or customize a particular TV show with regard to where it pulls the metadata.
Under Advanced Settings for the TV Show, there is this setting:
“Episode ordering: How the episodes are named on disk” which allows you to choose “Library Default” or “TMDB” or “TVDB”. If I choose “TVDB (Airing)”, do the Plex Dance, and Reload the Metadata, it does not name any episodes or pull any metadata from TVDB.
All works as expected if I create a second library that uses the TVDB Agent rather than the Plex agent and locate the TV show files in the new location. If I want to keep my Library in one place, I can not use the Plex Agent.
Refresh metadata doesn’t work. It still pulls the episode titles from PLEX instead of TVDB. The only way the show works correctly is if I put it inside separate library that used the TVDB agent.
If I do the PLEX dance within the Plex agent library, then it doesn’t pull any metadata at all - everything is just labeled “Episode 01” “Episode 02” etc.
This was bad TVDB ids on the TMDB episode pages. I’ve removed them so it should correct it self in the next couple of days on our end. In a few days just refresh the show metadata and it should come right.
I see now that the PLEX page for Dark Shadows (on watch.plex.tv) now shows the additional episodes in the Specials season, whereas before it only showed the 31 episodes from TMDB.
Now, however, the first 31 episodes are using the metadata from TMDB, and episodes 32-131 show the metadata from TVDB, and that is how it is currently loading into the library via the Plex TV Series Agent. 31 is a lot less episodes to manually change than 131, but I will check back in a couple days.
I’m a new Plex premium user and I am pretty frustrated at the state of my scanned TV Shows. Although I have perhaps 100 series, Plex displays about 8 series and dumps sometimes 100’s of random files under a show. Renaming at least some of the affected folder/files according to the guidelines and doing the Plex dance does not address the issue. It seems to ignore the file naming completely. See example screenshot of the mess that is created. I hope this is all user error and that there is an easy fix that I’m missing. Please advise.
Thank you. If this is true I hope you agree that this is ridiculous. The file name has all the information that is required to identify the file. I should be able to organize my folders how I please. Jellyfin for one has no problem with this.
Thanks again. I have read that and made the changes you suggest and all is good.
I have a peeve about having to organize my media folders to accommodate just one application when other applications (Jellyfin for one) can work with how I want to do it. I doubt that there’s a good technical reason why a file scan cannot handle different folder depths to reach files. I’m sure you’ve heard all this before so I won’t press the point any further.
