I got a warning today that the legacy agents will soon cease to work and that media items in such libraries will no longer receive metadata.
Please don’t do this without offering a way for users to scrape their own metadata.
I have a library full of live sports - Plex does not offer anything for that
I have a library containing adult entertainment - Plex does not offer anything for that
I have a german-based data source with German age ratings, German trailers, German genres, German user base for content rating plus German titles/descriptions/edition info. - Plex does only offer part of this and I don’t have a UI way of adding metadata to Plex data.
I have more than five-hundreds of documentary series where “official data” is not as complete I have them.
All of these may or may not be mainstream. But switching my own agents off is not only rude, but offering no alternative - via 3rd party agents will force me to manipulate ALL data for all new entries manually. What do you guys think how I will like that?
I would like to apply as volunteer to test certain things regarding alternative metadata agents in case you need some “grumpy old lad”'s opinion about things that work well and things that don’t.
Thank you! Like I said, we’ll share more when it’s ready.
But I can say that we will provide developers with documentation and time to implement alternative agents, alongside time for dedicated users like yourself to test things and provide feedback to both Plex and 3rd party agent developers.
This will not be something we will just flip a switch on one day without notice, as we understand the importance of this feature for some users.
Yeah, this is ultimately the weird thing. People have setups that work well. Plex insists this has to change but provides no reason. Employees helpfully reply to confirm stuff will be broken in the new scrapers/libraries, or to ask for help improving their new metadata cache which no one asked for to begin with, but no one will comment on why. Nothing else comparable to Plex (in some cases larger) is going through similar changes, so it seems unlikely that it’s being driven specifically by cost changes in TMDB, etc. It seems like this is just a corporate thing we’ll have no insight into.
It is good to find out that after breaking the stuff that currently works for no reason, Plex will help give us instructions to eventually fix it again. That’s a lot better than breaking the stuff that currently works for no reason and not giving us instructions to eventually fix it again.
Thanks for the assurances, I have one more point, I work on both two metadata agents, and i also work on a scanner for those two plugins, the naming is quite different then regular plex naming as such it most likely won’t match with standard plex scanner.
There is also case of two episodes releasing at the same time this mainly concerns Japanese media which usually don’t really have a back number i.e. episode number, and sometimes they release two episodes at the same day even though they aren’t continuation or parts of same episode. So i resorted to use the releasedate+4 extra random numbers that are generated based on the filename hash, i used to use mtime before but that was really flicky at best. Here is the scanner. which works fine right now on 350 show + 50K episodes.
On the metadata side, i have both custom metadata agent and youtube one as well, both are complemented by the excellent NFO scanner agents to pick the slack.
So, please before you go ahead and sunset this features, please consider that you most likely will not be able to cover every use case, plex support for non standard tvdb/imdb content is lacking.
