Plex TV series agent: What metadata source takes present? And why?

[yiveyplex]

Server Version#: 1.25.2.5319

Hi!
I’ve been pulling my hair so many times since the new Plex TV series agent was forced on us that I’ll soon go bold. It has perhaps improved user experience for some series, but for me as a contributor of metadata is has double or tripled my workload. It’s terrible.

Now I have to make sure the correct metadata is added to TVDb, TMDb and IMDb. Before I just needed to make sure one of them was correct and just point to that.

Adding or correcting metadata to TMDb or TVDb is one thing, that is instant and relatively easy, but adding or correcting on IMDb is just a big pain in my behind. Especially if something was incorrectly added, correcting it is extremely cumbersome. Sure, I understand it’s for the sake of quality of the database, but boy it’s frustrating.

The biggest problem for me is that there is no way of knowing what database PTVSA is pulling from. In the beginning it leaned heavily on TMDb because it couldn’t handle foreign languages on TVDb, but now it seem that IMDb takes present for some reason. This would all be “less bad” if the PTVSA had some way of reporting or correcting the error on a agent level for us users, but that doesn’t exist.

Take these series for example:

Monsen, Monsen og Mattis
NRK TV (original network)
TVDb
TMDb
IMDb (now changed title)
Both the TVDb and the TMDb sites has pretty decent metadata added to them, but the IMDb one is very basic and with very little contributed to it. The problem here is that someone had added the title “På tur med Monsen, Monsen og Mattis” to the IMDb page. That’s an incorrect title that isn’t officially used. With two databases having decent metadata and one having incorrect title, PTVSA still uses the wrong title. Isn’t it suppose to compare and use the most common one? (I added an correction to the title on IMDb so it is now correct, but PTVSA perhaps hasn’t picked it up yet).

Alla utom vi
Discovery+ (SE) (original network)
TVDb
TMDb
IMDb
Here we have good data on TVDb and IMDb, but not equally good on TMDb. Despite this PTVSA pulls the more or less non existence series overview from TMDb.

So, after this rant, the questions to the Plex team is:

1. How do I solve the issues with the above series on an agent level? I know I can change it on my server, but that isn’t to help for others.
2. When will you launch some way for us to force priority of fetching metadata again?
3. When will you launch some service to easily report issues with the metadata fetched? Telling us to create a new topic in the forums for every issue (as you told us when PTVSA launched) isn’t user friendly in any way and has a way too high threshold for it to be use widely.
4. Can you please create some sort of roadmap for us that contribute metadata to the sources you fetch from? Forcing us to contribute the same metadata to all three databases just to make sure it shows correctly 1-3 days later in Plex is extremely heavy work for no apparent reason.

EDIT:

5. Maybe you can add a feature on the server side to let the user choose between different available summaries, titles etc under edit->general? Today we can choose different artworks, we might as well be able to choose different text based metadata?

[yiveyplex]

No answer? How do I fix the bad metadata?

[yiveyplex]

Nobody? @drzoidberg33 @OttoKerner (I tag you because I’ve seen you been active/moderating in this forum section)?

The series “Monsen, Monsen og Mattis” is still showing as “På tur med Monsen, Monsen og Mattis” when searching for it on PTVSA, even though it isn’t named that anymore.

The series “Alla utom vi” is also still not showing any change in PTVSA, still only the “bad” metadata.

[BreezeDM]

I have the same problem. I don’t know how to fix my metadata. Sometimes if I fix things in TMDB, it will work out, other times it does nothing. TMDB will have actors A,B,C,D, TVDB will have actors A,B,C,D and IMDB will have actors A,B,C,D,E,F,G where D,E,F, G are foreign actors from dubs and all I will get will be D,E,F,G shown. It is some weird union whose logic I cant quite figure out.

[yiveyplex]

Come on people at Plex, no answer at all?

First, we - your users and customers - spend time collecting and adding metadata in various databases because one of them certainly isn’t enough.
Then, you at Plex collect said metadata and displays it like it’s coming from your database. Then, when there’s a fault in the presentation of said metadata and one of your customers points it out in your forum - there’s total radio silence.

How are we suppose to interpret that??

Sorry for the rough tone and rant, but for the love of ***, you NEED to better communicate with the people that actually help build your product.
Either create a support ticket system like TVDb has, or at least a separate forum section for direct contact with someone that actually can edit the database.

[Mr_Reed]

This is the one infuriating point of the new agent, especially for Anime shows, it mixes japanese and american voice actors in a nonsensical and incomplete way thus rendering actor searches totally useless because it is not consistent in its behavior.
I want only japanese VAs in my metadata, other may want only american ones, and most of all, we want more than the 10 the new agent defaults to.
You want to search for all shows featuring Maaya Sakamoto or all movies featuring Dwayne Johnson? YOU CAN’T because these won’t be returned consistently for every show or movie they were featured in.

[xSean]

The new TV Agent is just bad, all around a downgrade compared to the original.
Had to revert it to the old one

Recommend doing the same via the Advanced section when Editing a Library.

[yiveyplex]

Previously when they released PTVSA it wasn’t possible to revert back, good that they’ve added that option back.

[adriana]

Hi @yiveyplex

Plex generally prefers localized titles coming from TMDB. When those are not present we use the country based titles from IMDB. I took a look at the two shows that you mentioned, Monsen, Monsen og Mattis and Alla utom vi and I found a bug in the title ingestion logic. When it comes to title translations for the language that is also set as the original show language TMDB does not return that translation back into their API response, so we need to add some extra logic on our end to handle that special case. That is why in the case of these two shows we’ve fallen back to using the IMDB title

@yiveyplex

(I added an correction to the title on IMDb so it is now correct, but PTVSA perhaps hasn’t picked it up yet).

IMDB still returns both titles for Norway so even though you added a new title the old one is still being returned first.

This bug is on my radar now and will be fixed soon.