My Plex Server, just installed from scratch (1.13.0.5023) appears to have issues downloading images for TV shows and seasons. I’ve seen various threads out there regarding the same issue, but have had no luck trying what was suggested there.
I follow the Plex naming scheme religiously, and have performed the “Plex Dance” many times to try and alleviate this issues, but to no avail. Most of my shows are identified, often with textual metadata, but with no artwork (Movies appear to be ok).
Is this a known bug?
Note - firewall is off, not running any AV, server is Linux-based.
Since yesterday i have the exact same problem.
perhaps thetvdb changed stuff?
As near as I can tell, thetvdb now requires users to login when using the API, otherwise the they are stopped after a fairly small number of successes. But thetvdb configuration settings have no option to even provide login information, let alone actually use it. So maybe the metadata for 10 items is downloaded, and then it stops working. That is enough so you might see all the posters available for the series, but not all (or any) of the seasons.
In another thread there has been a suggested to switch your settings to TheMovieDatabase. This works, but there are cases where the two databases disagree with each other for episode sequencing. e.g. Some seasons of Family Ties. Someone else mentioned Will & Grace where one has combined the new and the old series and the other has not… Also if you want plex to download extra features automatically, that seems to require TheTVDB.
Basically the issue has been there is that TheTVDB has always been locked down for popular series. Those who control the locks make inconsistent decisions for different series. The maintainers for TheMovieDatabase have sometimes copied these seemingly arbitrary decisions, and have sometimes made independent decisions.
The mess that seems to been copied one for one is Doctor Who (2005). It drives me crazy to have 150 “specials”. Many of which would be better represented as a series like “Doctor Who Extras”. What bugs me more is only a small % of those are actually represented in Specials, so it is rather arbitrary when organizing those which I have to drop into specials, and which I have to follow my own naming convention and manually provide the meta data… In general though, once an episode number is provided you don’t want to change it in the database, even if it was incorrect. The reason being is suddenly everyone who named their local files to match that episode numbering are getting the wrong data. Typically the way one would solve such issues is versioning of the metadata. But if that was done, the average application like plex doesn’t support it.
I have the issue as well. It also happens on Plex Clooud, which is an older version, so that makes me think it’s an issue with thetvdb as well.
Thanks @docbillnet that’s good information. i wonder if this means that the TVDB is no longer useful for Plex? Or if users will have to create login information that can be passed via the PMS?
@docbillnet said:
As near as I can tell, thetvdb now requires users to login when using the API, otherwise the they are stopped after a fairly small number of successes. But thetvdb configuration settings have no option to even provide login information, let alone actually use it. So maybe the metadata for 10 items is downloaded, and then it stops working. That is enough so you might see all the posters available for the series, but not all (or any) of the seasons.
The API does not require any user login for series information, only the normal API key: https://api.thetvdb.com/swagger
We were having some serious stability issues last week but we pushed out fixes on Friday (June 1) that has fixed it. Not sure what’s going on with Plex scrapers right now since we haven’t been able to reproduce the problem on our end.
@TheMattS is the “normal API key” something that the user (i.e. myself) must explicitly generate on my end (or at the TVDB) and somehow communicate via PMS?
@magmaiceman nope, it’s all handled at the application level.
Thanks @TheMattS So I gather that is all performed automatically under-the-hood then, transparently? (assuming that The TVDB is selected as an Agent)
