Server Version#: Version 1.28.2.6151
Player Version#: Any but at the time of reporting - Version 4.90.1
This one is a little complicated to please try and stay with me. As a working example, I’ll use She-Ra: Princess of Power from 1985 as its the most recent show to exhibit this issue.
Do the following:
Get into your time machine and go back say 2 years into the past
Its now, 2020 so lets add a show, match it and ensure all the metadata is downloaded using the correct naming and episode ordering, I’m using TMDB in this example.
Now watch the show over the course of a year. Normal viewing.
No problems so far - the show at this point will be fully reported as played in plex.
Within 24/48 hours of this change it then replicates this update to plex.
Its now Sept 2022 again, so lets force refresh the metadata of the show after this changes replicates to the plex back-end.
Result:
Plex picks one of these and sets it as unplayed (S01E06 in this example). See below:
I’m guessing but maybe plex has assigned some new guid number for the episode in the backend so it thinks its a new episode.
While I understand this is somewhat of an edge case it does happen at least a couple of times a year for me with episodes randomly getting marked unplayed which where played. Can anything be done by plex development to help with situations like this …
Wouldn’t it be this “new” episode 80 showing up as unplayed rather than the previously correct episode 6? I understand you have fixed it on TMDB since, but I assume you’re talking about a metadata refresh before your fix, no?
Nope it shouldn’t (I think). The move to episode 80 is done as a temporary workaround just to move the episodes around as you cannot reorder on tmdb, you have to change the episode numbers themselves.
So in this example e06 became e80, then e07 became e06 and finally e80 became e07. This is all done within seconds of each other. The plex metadata backend would never have picked up e80.
Right, but then you end up with an episode that wasn’t there before (80), and Plex treats it as a newly added episode, hence marking it as unplayed. I don’t see anything wrong with that. After you changed it back to the correct order, the new episode should be gone again, and everything is marked as played again, no? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the way this all happened.
You are, Its like on Windows, you cannot have 2 files with the same name. File A, File B. the files need to swap names, so you take File B, rename it to File SOMETHING, take File A and rename it to File B, then take File SOMETHING and rename it to File A
Hmm, I don’t see what that has to do with this particular case. The issue is that someone at TMDB made changes that he shouldn’t have, thereby moving episodes up and out of order. Doku says Plex backend should have never picked this up, because he edited everything back the way it was very quickly (btw, how did you notice it so fast?).
The underlying issue is that at both TMDB and TVDB, series that are done and verified are not permanently locked from editing. This used to be the case at TVDB, but it isn’t any longer. Been a long time since I’ve seen a locked show. Unfortunately, there will always be people who mess with stuff for no good reason.
My guess is this happening because plex is changing the guid of the episodes, on a reorder! Looking in the DB itself (I’ve various backups I’m using as reference) I can see in tables metadata_item_settings and metadata_item_views the guid’s of the episodes swapping around and I’d say this is messing up the played/unplayed status.
Anyhow, I’ll just go and run a fixup, just wish plex was more tolerant of cases like this. The episode itself has not changed, its only the order of them.
