Plex problem with metadata

[an3k]

It is known that the new Plex Agents provide better metadata results.

The assignment and download of metadata is much faster but to be honest the quality isn’t any better than pulling only from TheMovieDB or TheTVDB.
I get hundreds of posters with a horrible quality and those posters aren’t even allowed to be uploaded to TheMovieDB or TheTVDB. And I cannot disable a option so I stop pulling those ■■■■■■ “artwork”.

Actual issue that shows very well why the new Agents aren’t better (beside their much faster assignment and download):

1st result: IMDB
2nd result: TheTVDB
3rd result: TheMovieDB

The result from watch.plex.tv isn’t even shown … but it should be the only result and be the correct one.

The problem is that Plex incorrectly matches with that student film that can only be found on IMDB. The reason for that probably is that Plex and IMDB thinks the movie was released in 2020 while it was officially released in 2021. IMDB uses the year of the first appearance of a movie (eg. a festival) while every other database uses the first official appearance in a typical theater / cinema.

It doesn’t matter if you prefer the IMDB way or the TheMovieDB / TheTVDB way. The problem still exists whatever you prefer.

It’s probably impossible to change the date of every single IMDB entry and change how IMDB works, thus the only solution would be to ignore IMDB for matching purposes if there is a match in other databases.

While I trust IMDB more with the more technical data and background information I much more trust TheMovieDB / TheTVDB with correct “surface data” like localized title, release date, actors, cover art.

Ideally the data of all three databases would get consolidated into watch.plex.tv and Plex only pulls from there. Then we would at least get a correct match with maybe wrong data, but that data could be easily updated. Sadly, we as users cannot even submit a info about wrong data or anything.

[OttoKerner]

Is this about poster quality
or is this about a movie mismatch due to the existence of two same-titled movies from the same year?
I am not sure, but it appears to be the latter.

If the matching is off because movie title and release year are still ambiguous, then you can fall back to the database ID numbers of either TheMovieDB or IMDb.
To indicate to Plex that the second hit from the above screenshot is actually the right one, you visit e.g. IMDb.com and fetch the ID from the URL of the correct movie page. i.e. https://imdb.com/title/tt6435934/

Then you put it into the subfolder name of this movie.

/Movies
   /The Last Journey (2021) - {imdb-tt6435934}
      The Last Journey (2021).mkv

[an3k]

It’s about the problematic new agent in general. Horrible poster selection and stupid matching as an example.

The matching is off because the Plex agent is not working well. Renaming the file is not the correct way of fixing a matching problem with Plex. The database the content is matched against needs to get fixed.

The problem is the 2nd and 3rd entry. It’s the same movie but Plex lists it as two separate ones. Another problem is that selecting the 3rd movie doesn’t pull any metadata but the cover. Selecting the 2nd movie actually pulls metadata.
Also, the 3rd entry isn’t that accurate either. The synopsis and cover comes from TheMovieDB but the release date is not from that DB because they also show 2021.

TL;DR: Plex Inc. needs to fix their database.