When recording many of my kids shows Plex pulls the wrong Title information but sometimes grabs the right description information. I have discovered why.
Problem 1. When Plex DVR records a show, it grabs the season/episode # from the broadcast. For example: PAW Patrol S3E16 - Parroting Pups; Merpups Save the Turbots. It grabs metadata from TVDB, and TVDB considers the two episodes in this recording to be 2 separate episodes. TVDB considers these two episodes as E26 and E27. For every single recording of kids shows, I have to manually separate each file into two files and re-upload to Plex. The whole point of DVR is automation, which this negates for 75% of my library.
Problem 2. Because I have now manually organized the videos in accordance with TVDB, Plex DVR thinks many of these episodes aren’t in my library. For the above example, it now thinks I have E26 & 27, but I no longer have E16. Plex will now queue up E16 again (which is e26/27 that I already have). It will keep trying to record these episodes over and over again wasting the tuners of my DVR device.
I know Plex needs to pull from TVDB and the cause of the problem is the fact that TVDB names things differently that whatever the broadcast does, but I think that If I am paying a monthly fee for DVR then it should at least grab the proper Episode/title/description without having to manually divide recordings & screwing up all future recordings.
I have now realized that I need to revert everything back to the way it was. Say there’s 10 recordings, of technically 20 TVDB episodes. I cannot split them up because Plex now thinks I have 20 episodes of a show. When the broadcast comes out with a new episode, say E11, Plex already thinks I have it and doesn’t record it. Right now, it’s a better option to live with incorrect metadata while still getting new recordings than to name everything correctly and have all the DVR settings messed up.
It would be nice if there was a way to “force” the metadata. I have used emby and they have the ability for you to enter the id for various metadata services, thus ensuring that your metadata is correct. I appreciate the “smart” approach of plex, but when plex gets it wrong there is nothing easy that can be done to correct the mistake.
I have been using the live tv and dvr but 95% of the tv shows show up as movies and there seems to be nothing I can do about it otehr than manually editing filenames or whatever, and as the OP mentioned that pretty much makes the automation pointless.
The problem is not with Plex, it is with TheTVDB. Plex uses Gracenote for the Guide data which is using data from the broadcast station from what I understand. I record Curious George for some friends kids. In Plex (Gracenote data) the episode(s) to be recorded tomorrow show as S5·E6—George-O-Matic; Curious George, Sheep Herder which matches what TVGuide for my area shows, as well as the PBS Guide information.
If I view the IMDB for the same Season/Episode it shows the same information:
The problem comes from TheTVDB it appears as they have split out each show into separate episodes so Episode 1 on all other sites is split to Episode 1 & 2 on TheTVDB so Episode 6 is Episode 11 & 12.
Since TheTVDB is a community supported site anyone with an account can edit the data on the site. This would probably irritate the user(s) that are splitting these episodes. I personally don’t really care since these recordings are not for me. I have found this same type of discrepancies with TheTVDB for lots of shows that are aired on PBS.
Someone recommended using TMDB instead. For most of the kids shows, it actually works better than TVDB. It groups multi-episodes into one episode correctly. However, it doesn’t do this for all of them. It’s better, buts not perfect.
In the DVR settings you’ll find an option to enable Enhanced Program Guide. It uses TVDB when that feature is enabled and EPG when disabled. Hope that helps.
I’ve always seen this option in settings and have always had it un-checked, however it’s still pulling info from TVDB. Here is an example of a recording I did today.
Am I missing something? Gracenote seems to always be accurate which is the metadata I would like to keep vs. TVDB
@kinoCharlino said:
In the DVR settings you’ll find an option to enable Enhanced Program Guide. It uses TVDB when that feature is enabled and EPG when disabled. Hope that helps.
Nevermind, I miss-read what you wrote. So it’s pulling the initial Program Guide data from TVDB if that option is checked vs. Gracenote if un-checked.
What I was hoping for is to use Gracenote for Program Guide Data as it has been very acurate for me. Then use that data after the recording is completed vs. fetching incorrect data from TVDB.
I’ve had enhanced guide it checked since installation. The episode #'s listed on the guide are not the same as TVDB. The DVR guide on Plex will show episode 13, but after recording Plex scans the metadata and determines it to be episode 20something. Switching to TMDB for kids shows doesn’t grab all the data for every show, but at least it keeps the episode and naming correct for the ones it does. The others it just lables “episode #”.
This is also the only way I’ve found to avoid Plex redownloading episodes. Without TMDB, Plex thinks I have episode 20something from earlier, but it’s actually episode 13. Plex will record episode 13 over and over, then rescan it and call it episode 20something. Very aggravating. TMBD is just a work around.
