Plex Series Scanner resolves TV episodes one day earlier - Timezone defect perhaps?

General Discussions
1

I’ve got tv rss that is saving using the format: “Seth.Meyers.2024.01.10.Kurt.Russell.1080p.WEB.h264.mkv”. Plex is resolving it to the episode that aired on January 9th (Seth.Meyers.2024.01.09.Dua.Lipa.1080p.WEB.h264.mkv. ). I’ve tried different naming formats, but it still matches to the wrong day.
The air date is correct, but all other meta data reflects the wrong day.

I’m running on Windows in NZ timezone (GMT +1300).
I’m wondering if the scanner is wrong taking timezones into consideration, when parsing the file, mixing timezone differences to the actual air date - i.e US timezone (UTC-5 to UTC-10).
e.g the file above aired 10-Jan EST (UTC-5), which is 11-Jan NZDT. Perhaps the Plex scanner searches against UTC? This would make that the dates wrong as demonstrated, which should not be done as the air date is the same irrespective of the timezone.
Is this a defect?

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2

I’ve had issues with that show myself. I believe it’s a side effect of plex attempting to match the episode based on the date itself, rather than an episode number. Seth Meyers (and all the internet pirate people) label these episodes based on the day it DID air… at the time zone it aired locally to the show. Our servers, however, match an episode against OUR timezone. For me, this episode airs after midnight, so the 1/10 episode (based on filename) matches to the episode that aired the previous night, 1/9, since the 1/9 episode aired (to me) on 1/10.

I’ve had to “acquire” an episode or two of this show in particular when Plex’s DVR failed to record it for some reason (no excuse given, but it’s rare enough I haven’t looked into it), and noticed it is a b**** to match this episode properly. I think I end up finding out the TVDB episode number it really is supposed to be, and entering that in the filename instead of using the date format.

If this really is the reason, then setting your server’s timezone to the west coast might cause seth’s show to match correctly, but this may screw up many more things elsewhere.

3

Just to clarify: you do have these files stored within the necessary folder structure, right?
Because there is no TV show titled “Seth Meyers”. Plex needs a proper show title in order to make a sensible match.
So the folder structure name should at least look like this:

/TV Shows <-- this folder added to the Plex library
   /Late Night with Seth Meyers (2014)
      /Season 11
         Seth.Meyers.2024.01.10.Kurt.Russell.1080p.WEB.h264.mkv
         Seth.Meyers.2024.01.09.Dua.Lipa.1080p.WEB.h264.mkv
         ...

Is this the case on your server?

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4

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