After upgrading to the new Plex TV Series agent, two episodes of Season 4 of “The Twilight Zone” (1959) are mismatched. Though the files are correctly named, the metadata for Episode 1 “In His Image” is swapped with the metadata for Episode 3 “Valley of the Shadow”. Reverting to the legacy TV agent clears up the problem.
There may be other mismatches but I haven’t checked the whole series yet.
Can this be fixed in the agent? And in the meantime is there a workaround? I’ve restarted the server, and I’ve tried removing those entries, emptying trash, and putting back those entries, but the behavior persists.
The problem is caused by incorrect external TVDB ids for those episodes on TMDB. I’m not at my PC at the moment but will fix these later on unless someone else fixes it first.
EDIT: Fixed the records on TMDB. Give it 24-48 hours to replicate to the plex cache servers and then force a refresh on your side of the show should fix the problem.
Thanks. I hadn’t realized that the TV agent pulls TV data from TMDB. I don’t suppose there’s any way to bypass the Plex server cache, or force a local refresh?
This does raise another question: I had tried to use “Fix Match” to correct this, by specifically naming TVDB as the source for the series (“tvdb-73587”) as described in the support article for the TV agent, but that didn’t work either. Might there be a problem with “Fix Match” as well?
Plex having incorporated THE WORLD’S WORST TV SHOW DATABASE and FORCED IT ON EVERYONE - that right there is going to cause a whole lotta hurt.
Well, the mystery of the Man of Constant Sorrow having to hand edit entries with ‘this new agent’ has been solved. I got TMDB rammed down my throat. Oh, Joy.
rrgomes sits down to watch some TV episodes streamed from his media server, fully expecting everything to be normal as it has been on countless previous occasions. And everything is normal until he checks the episode’s metadata…
Wait…
That can’t be right…
That doesn’t make sense…
Horror grips them as they realise that somehow 1 is now as 3 and 3 is as 1. Hoping to regain some sense of normality they head to the Plex forums.
What you have just witnessed could be the end of a particularly terrifying nightmare. It isn’t - it’s the beginning.
Although rrgomes doesn’t know it, he is about to enter a strange new world, too incredible to be real, too real to be a dream. It’s called the Twilight Zone.
I mentioned this to someone else the other day - I’m not sure what you’re putting on your server or why you think TMDB is a better TV Show Database - but you’re wrong - or you’re not putting the same stuff on your server that I am.
I may recant saying this after I’ve had more experience with the new TV agent, but I have no problem in principle with using TMDB as a TV source as long as issues like this are easy to correct. At least TMDB seems to be a little more accessible when making corrections to the data. TVDB is also open in theory but they have an annoying habit of “locking” series and it’s too much trouble to use their ticket system to make corrections.
But the TMDB data is now the first thing I’ll check when there are anomalies like this.
Yep - sure enough.
If you have an account you can make up whatever you want - to fit whatever you have.
There’s a reason TVDB doesn’t allow that.
And it’s a pretty good one.
It appears we have no choice.
My FileBot will be naming to Match TVDB - no matter what.
That means I’ll be doing a lot of hand editing when someone with an account at TMDB, armed with a wild idea of correctness, butts heads with FileBot.
The main thing I hope to gain from the new agent is the ability to add Local Extras for TV shows. I’ve been using @contrary_cat’s excellent plug-in to achieve this for a while, but the problem there has always been the lack of support in Plex clients, in particular the Apple TV client which is my main interface to my Plex library.
There’s still a lack of support in clients but Plex has at least signaled their intent to provide support for Local TV Extras in other clients going forward.
At the risk of broadening the topic too much, let me say/ask one more thing. My main complaint with the Extras mechanism in Plex has always been the lack of any way to add metadata apart from the broad category (Trailers, Interviews, etc.) and a title derived from the file name.
Are there any third-party plugins that make it possible to include more metadata? Something like a JSON representation that I could also carry around to another server if I wanted to do that?
Does that sort of thing happen a lot, people just messing things up? I can only speak for myself but I’ve always tried to be conservative and tasteful when making changes to existing data, just like on Wikipedia.
Undeniably some of the data on TMDB is poorly written. Some movie descriptions editorialize, some are nothing more than scene-by-scene descriptions complete with spoilers. I confess I’ve occasionally taken a heavy editing hand to some of those.
FileBot takes the horror show naming that usually arrives, querries TVDB (at my choosing) and extrapolates THE EXACT SHOW, then names it EXACTLY AS SHOWN in the database, so there is RARELY an issue with instant matching for a show FileBot just went and got the name for.
Then it names, and structures (if allowed) the material, including subtitles, for that instant match you live for (at least I do):
Perhaps not (always) on purpose, but in the wild west, when you’re allowed to do anything you want - you might do something wrong - like the Bozo that ripped the episodes off the Twilight Zone disc, named 'em wrong, 'cause checking would have slowed him down - and the rest of the Plexiverse pays the price 'cause now we put our full and absolute trust in THE MOVIE DATABASE for a TV Show.
This is just the tip of a HUGE ICEBURG, it’s dead ahead, and we’re gonna hit it.
Here’s a hot tip:
If you have a pipe burst - don’t call an Electrician.
