I’m having an issue with episode ordering on Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. I have episode ordering set to match TVDB Aired order, but the episode names in Plex are incorrect and do not match TVDB itself. They are correct on the TVDB itself, and have been for awhile.
I’ve triple checked that my episodes are named properly. They are named to TVDB order. Each episode shows up in Plex. But it is mapped to the
Here are the first ten episodes and how I have them named, matching TVDB order:
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood - S01E09-E10 - Prince Wednesday Finds a Way to Play + Finding a Way to Play WEBRip-1080p x264 AAC.mp4
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood - S01E07-E08 - Daniel Gets Mad + Katerina Gets Mad WEBRip-1080p x264 AAC.mp4
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood - S01E05-E06 - Daniel’s Babysitter + Daniel Goes to School WEBRip-1080p x264 AAC.mp4
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood - S01E03-E04 - Daniel Visits School + Daniel Visits the Doctor WEBRip-1080p x264 AAC.mp4
Switched to other episode orders, refreshed metadata. Then back and refreshed metadata.
Waited a few weeks to see changes.
Double checked TVDB ordering. It hasn’t been changed since October.
I know episode ordering of kid’s shows can be a little weird. But before Plex deprecated the other metadata agents, I could just make sure my episodes matched TVDB (or even fix TVDB). Now it seems like Plex really screws up kids shows.
I set up a test directory for this and just used very simple file names, s01e01-e02.mp4, s01e07-e08.mp4. My server is set to use the default ordering which would match TMDB. It matched and actually for these few episodes, TVDB & TMDB are very similarly titled. I switch to TVDB aired ordered and then I got the odd ordering you posted.
I don’t think this is your fault. I think this can all be blamed on missing or bad external ID’s on TMDB. The few episodes I looked at had not external ID for TVDB. I was really curious about S01E07. That title actually belongs to S05E16. When I look at that episode on TMDB, it has an external id for IMDB S01E07 and I think that is where getting messed up.
Ideally the thing to do is to go through TMDB and add the appropriate external ID’s for the TVDB entries and fix any incorrect external ID’s like the one I mentioned. Yes, it will be a pain in the butt.
I think this is the right approach. I’m still learning about how all this stuff works. Hopefully, if I’m off base, someone that knows more will chime in. I’ll keep my test setup in place and follow along. Keep in mind, as with any metadata changes, it will take a bit of time for Plex to ingest the updates.
This did solve my issue after the changes from TMDB propagated to Plex’s Metadata Agent. I appreciate your help.
It is frustrating, because the new metadata agent “broke” a lot of shows that were fine before. The old metadata agent worked better with old shows and kids shows. The issue is that old shows and kids shows often have multiple different “correct” episode orders–Intended Order, Aired Order, Syndication Order, Streaming Order, DVD Order. For kids shows, people will often put the two segments that aired together as an episode, when the style guide for both TMDB and TVDB call for each episode to have its own segment.
People go back and “correct” the episode ordering. And it messes things up. Especially since it this new Metadata agent relies more on the links between TMDB and TVDB. Previously. I just had to pay attention to TVDB changes. When a series was set to TVDB ordering, it matched TVDB. This is the behavior one would expect. If someone’s fix was more correct, I could just fix my content. If someone’s change didn’t follow TVDB style, I could go back and revert it in TVDB and wait for the change. With the new metadata agent, to keep correct ordering, I need to change it on both. Which requires much more research to keep episodes properly labeled.
In my Daniel Tiger example, things are correct now. But if someone makes a change to TVDB or TMDB, it will mess things up again.
It’s not practical in my case to go back and change my episode ordering to TMDB.
This is where I think Emby\Jellyfin have an advantage because they have ways to lock down when someone makes changes at those source sites - particularly for older shows.
Emby\Jellyfin have two settings I’d like to see Plex adopt.
One is a “lock” option available per title so if you like how the data is set currently, you can lock it and it won’t refresh even if sources change. That gets a little annoying to manage for each title (can’t multiselect titles and lock) but works well for one-offs.
Currently in Plex you can only lock specific fields individually (and artwork “automatic locks” aren’t always respected).
The other setting, which is the one I really want in Plex, is the option to not update any metadata after certain number of days and\or only if that field is currently empty. This would allow me to avoid metadata refreshing for established titles messing things up months or years later, but still let new episodes of a TV show update with thumbnails and episode summary\titles that get populated after airing.
Currently in Plex, you can either have metadata refreshing enabled or disabled. Some folks have systems in place to leave it disabled and pull metadata manually for local but I wanna be lazy and have my media server software do it for me - which was kinda the point but it’s become less reliable.
I agree that with the new agent - and TMDB in particular becoming more finicky after revamping rules and getting a bit more strict about it and changing older shows and Plex relying a LOT on TMDB - this has become a bit more common of an issue and having that option to have metadata refreshing only for new titles would be helpful.
