A nagging problem. The overwhelming majority of my shows match nicely. However, there are a few that refuse to pull episode metadata. The shows in question seem to have matched without issue (the poster and show summary appear), but episodes are named “Episode 1”, “Episode 2” despite what TVDB has listed as episode titles.
An example:
Conan Without Borders {tvdb-342722} > Season 1 > Conan Without Borders - S01E01 - Conan in Cuba [1080p]
This episode appears as “Episode 1”, not “Conan in Cuba” as expected.
I’m using the Plex TV series scanner, Plex Series agent. ‘Prefer Local Metadata’ is disabled, and I”m using TVDB episode ordering.
Any suggestions on fixing these few pesky shows to pull in the proper episode titles?
I created a folder for this show in my testing library. It matches. My library is set to default to TMDB. Initially, the episodes appeared as you mentioned, Episode 1, Episode 2 and so on.
I went to the top level folder for the show, clicked on the pencil, clicked on Advanced, the Episode Ordering, I selected TVDB (aired). Now I see this:
Thanks for the reply. I was tinkering with TMDB vs TVDB ordering as well and got the same result as you. The funny thing is that while using TVDB fixed this show, it caused issues with episode names on other shows that had previously been fine. Seems like some shows prefer one source over another (even after doing a full refresh of metadata for the library).
I use PlexTraktSync, which reports ‘unmatched’ shows after it runs. I get many more such reports with TVDB than TMDB. Sigh.
Yeah, this particular show isn’t even on TMDB, which kind of surprised me.
Not really surprised TVDB shows up more as unmatched. Couple things going on. Plex initially pulls data primarily from TMDB and uses external IDs for the episodes on TVDB to be able to do the sorting aired/DVD, etc. Now in some cases, those IDs may be missing, which screws up the matching/sorting and in a number of cases they are present but incorrect. Over past several months TVDB has for various reasons changed the IDs for shows. If these don’t get updated in TMDB as well, you imaged the chaos that ensues.
So are you getting the TVDB episode names now? Are you playing with the TVDB vs TMDB ordering as the library level? You only need to change if for that particular show. Mostly my TV Shows library is using TMDB, but I do have a few shows where I have selected either TVDB(aired) or TVDB(DVD).
There might be some residual links between episodes at tmdb and tvdb causing some weirdness. I see for example tvdb has a show link to the now removed tmdb entry.
Yes, at the library level. Setting ‘Conan’ to TVDB at the series level works. I’ve got a few other shows that have similar issues - I’ll toggle their sorting as well and see what happens.
Good to know! I was having issues with a couple of other series as well. I set the library to TMDB ordering, and the problematic series to TVDB ordering and that seemed to have helped. Kinda hit-or-miss.
Plex consolidates metadata from multi sources into a single set of data. You can’t tell plex to use tmdb or tvdb metadata, all you do is reorder the metadata they have based on how tmdb or tvdb order the episodes. This is why it might appear hit or miss, especially when shows are radically different between the online sites.
Tmdb is also their default and starting reference point which is why we always start looking there when there is problems with metadata in plex.
Here’s the feature request that @dokuro mentioned (to support TMDB episode groups; it’s actually a continuation of the request to support TVDB alternate orderings):
