My kids love Wild Kratts on PBS, so I set Plex up to record airings. When they are recorded and we go back to plex to view them the metadata is incorrect in that the name of the episode is wrong, so the kids pick an episode based on the thumbnail only to find out it’s not the one they thought it would be.
Again these shows are recorded via the DVR feature in plex, I am not naming the media myself as Plex is naming the show based on the data fed to it via the EPG for PBS. When I view the file names of the media they are correct, when I view the episode data in the EPG it is also correct, but when the recording is finished Plex will assign some other random Wild Kratts episode title and thumbnail to the recording.
I have tried “fix match” at the show level but it has not helped. I have pulled this show out of the library, let it scan, and then stuck it back in and scanned again, but still it makes no difference.
Here is a good example. Season 2 episode 9 was “Speaking Dolphinese”. The file is named correctly on the file system, has the correct title in the EPG and Plex labels it “Blowfish Blowout”.
Recording from the EPG:
Media info in the library showing the file name on the system ending in .ts since it was recorded by Plex DVR:
Same issue that many PBS shows have, there does not appear to be a single list of episode data among any online sources. Plex uses the Season/Episode data to look up the metadata for the show. The metadata is pulled by default from TheTVDB. You can switch this to The Movie Database but in this case the metadata is the same. Plex gets the Season/Episode from Gracenote which gets their data from the broadcasters. If PBS is reporting that season 2 episode 9 is Speaking Dolphinese but TheTVDB and TMDB report it as being Blowfish Blowout I am not sure what Plex can do about this discrepancy when it pulls the metadata for the episode.
That is really helpful information for understanding how this process works and I can now totally understand why this is happening.
Plex is consulting online sources of episode information and they are giving it consistent information but information that is different than what PBS is airing, this leans toward PBS being the at fault party and not Plex as metatdata lookups on other shows work just fine via the normal acquisition methods (which I understand in a lot better detail now!).
Is there anyway I can override this or adjust it manually for Wild Kratts so that the thumbnails and episode titles match with the recorded content? My main goal is to just ensure “what you click is what you get” when choosing an episode to watch for the kids.
The only suggestion I have would be to try setting up a library for the PBS shows and set the Agent on the Advanced tab of the Library settings to Personal Media Shows. See if that maintains the Show Title as recorded.
