Plex Agent seemingly ignoring TVDB ID forced matching

[unrulysunruly]

Server Version#: 1.41.6.9685
Player Version#: N/A
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Had to rebuild my server recently, and updated Plex to its latest stable release after not updating for like a year or so. To my surprise, my favored TVDB agent is no longer able to be used. Shouldn’t be a problem, right? The new Plex Agent says it also pulls from TVDB, and all of my TV shows are named and organized properly, complete with TVDB IDs.

Nope. At least it really seems to be struggling some shows. In some cases, like with the anime and live action versions of Cowboy Bebop, it’s merging them into a single show. In others, like with Fullmetal Alchemist or Blood+, it’s matching them with similarly titled shows. With both issues, it’s apparently ignoring the fact that the folder names contain their TVDB IDs for a forced match.

Two examples of what I mean(and yes, I know I have two copies of the live action Cowboy Bebop episodes in their folder) -

With Cowboy Bebop, I was able to just split the show, and when I went to manually match the shows after the split it chose the correct one right off the bat. With Fullmetal Alchemist it detected the correct match as soon as I hit Fix Match. With Blood+, it wouldn’t even return the show as a selection choice when trying to manually match and searching by name. I had to search by TVDB ID number to get it to let me properly choose the show.

I use TVDB IDs specifically because I use Filebot for naming my media, and TVDB has far fewer problems with anime and other shows out of Japan compared to my experience trying to match them using TMDB. Using TMDB matching in Filebot was always absolutely terrible about improperly matching anime. And now I’m running into the exact same situation with bad matching in Plex, even when I should be forcing Plex to match it to a specific TVDB ID. This makes me think that there’s an issue with the way the Plex Agent works and what priority it gives to forced matches. It seems to me that it isn’t properly checking for forced matches, at least not TVDB ones, before trying to search for a match using TMDB.

[OttoKerner]

What exactly did you select on the library’s Advanced tab for Scanner and Agent?

Which folder is added to the library, on the Library’s “Add Folders” tab?
Are there more than one folders appearing in there? And if so, is there one folder located inside of an other folder?

Did you set the default Episode Ordering to be “TheTVDB (Aired)”? (also on the “Advanced” tab of the library properties)

[unrulysunruly]

The Scanner is Plex TV Series and the Agent is Plex Series. When I first encounted the issues, the source folder that I used for the library, was /srv/plex/Media/TV Shows(explanation of changes to follow). Default episode ordering is set to TheTVDB.

I try to keep my anime separated as I maintain a second server for a family member who has extremely limited internet access and thus isn’t able to remotely stream from mine, and that family member doesn’t want any of it. So I keep anime sequestered on my offline backups for ease of doing an rsync to a headless box when I take my backups down to throw new media on their server.

When I had to rebuild my personal server, I placed my anime in a subdirectory inside ../TV Shows/, so that individual show pathing would have been ../TV Shows/Anime/Show Title {TVDB ID} as opposed to simply ../TV Shows/Show Title {TVDB ID}. But the new agent/scanner apparently didn’t like the subdirectory and it kept merging shows together in weird ways. I assumed it was something to do with the subdivide between ../TV Shows/ and /TV Shows/Anime/ so I tried moving some of them back to just ../TV Shows/ and the issue persisted at least in part. So then I moved the Anime subdirectory out to ../Media/Anime/ and added that directory as an additional source for the library.

This fixed the random merging, but that was when I discovered the issue with the improper matching despite every show having a TVDB ID as part of their folder naming.

So to summarize:

Directory structure of ../TV Shows/Anime/Show Title {TVDB ID} with sole library source being ../Media/TV Shows/ resulted in almost all of my anime being merged into just a handful of shows regardless of wildly different names and TVDB IDs.

Directory structure of ../TV Shows/Show Title {TVDB ID} with sole library source being ../Media/TV Shows/ resulted in at least one show merging with a similarly named(nearly identical, really) show despite both of their directories including different TVDB IDs and production dates.

Removing the Anime subdirectory from the main library source and making it into an additional library source, so that I had the library pulling from ../Media/TV Shows/ and ../Media/Anime/, resulted in no more incorrect merging, but plenty of incorrect matching persisted despite all directories having their TVDB IDs included.

[OttoKerner]

@unrulysunruly

Removing the Anime subdirectory from the main library source and making it into an additional library source, so that I had the library pulling from ../Media/TV Shows/ and ../Media/Anime/, resulted in no more incorrect merging, but plenty of incorrect matching persisted despite all directories having their TVDB IDs included.

This was the correct thing to do. I can only assume that the issues you have, are late results of the time when you had the stacked anime folder inside the regular tv shows folder.

See if the careful execution of the Plex Dance of the whole show will correct the mismatched shows.

Side note: your first screenshot doesn’t show Cowboy Bebop (1998) inside the Anime folder.

[unrulysunruly]

Side note: your first screenshot doesn’t show Cowboy Bebop (1998) inside the Anime folder.

I’m aware. That screenshot was after summary point #2, when I tried to take shows out of the Anime subdirectory, but before I moved the Anime subdirectory and made it into its own library source. Prior to that it was merged into a different show altogether, along with about 30 other anime as mentioned in summary point #1.

Regardless, it would appear that the new Plex agent is not correctly recognizing TVDB IDs when they’re being used to force a match. Which goes counter to what Plex themselves say should happen in their support page about naming and organizing TV shows. And given my prior experience with TMDB’s inadequate ability to handle anime matching when renaming files in Filebot, and the fact that the new Plex agent uses TMDB as its primary metadata source with no way to change it, it appears to me that there is a priority issue in how the agent parses directory names and searches for matches, at least when it comes to TVDB IDs in the directory name. To my untrained eyes the agent appears to be parsing the series name and running it through TMDB for a match, then when it gets any return from TMDB it appears to ignore everything else, including ignoring a TVDB ID that’s been properly included in the directory naming structure.

To go a bit deeper into how I came to the conclusion that there is something wrong with the new Plex Agent, when I figured out the merging issue and was met with the matching issue, the folder /Blood+ {TVDB-78960} was matched to a show titled “Blood” from 2018, a UK show with a TVDB ID of 353462, which is not a show I have in my library. It was a matching based entirely on name and ignored the provided TVDB ID altogether. And while yes, the directory for Blood+ did not have the production year in it, that should matter far, far less than me literally giving the agent the exact ID number that the show is to be matched to.

Attempting to fix the match by manually searching for the title of “Blood+” did not return the anime in the results at all and, oddly enough, also doesn’t include the “Blood (2018)” show that Plex originally auto-matched the show to(That only shows up if you search for “Blood” instead of “Blood+”). Going to TMDB’s website and searching for “Blood+” also fails to bring up the show and brings up the exact same listings as manually searching “Blood+” in Plex does. Even searching for “Blood+ y:2005” on TMDB’s website does not bring up the proper anime as the first choice, instead placing 3 other shows ahead of it in the results, indicating that they were considered better matches for the search query. The way I had to fix the match in Plex was by manually searching for “TVDB-78960”.

The failure of the searches on TMDB’s website point to a problem on their end, and is in keeping with my experiences with TMDB for matching in Filebot. But Plex also suffering from those exact same failures when a match is already provided per Plex’s own recommended methods shows a failure in how the new Plex Agent is working. This is a failure that the old legacy agents did not have, in my experience.

So I suppose this is more of a bug report than a help request. If this is not the intended area of the forums for that, then I’m sorry for posting here, but I didn’t see a section for bug reports.

[OttoKerner]

Do you use a DNS based Internet filter? If so, did you add a whitelist of allowed domains when you started using Plex? This list needs extending when you switch to the modern agent. Otherwise it won’t be able to get all the data it requires.