Jeopardy’s entry on TVDB is fairly good. Every episode had a descriptive title with the three contestants on that episode. After upgrading my library, when the show refreshed itself, the show names have been replaced with terrible titles like “Show #8469”. Is there some way to pin the metadata to a good source? I already tried the “sorting” method which doesn’t do anything regarding the metadata, despite this post by a Plex employee on reddit:
The new agent pulls from our own aggregation of data from TMDB, TVDB, and IMDb. From there, you can select TVDB or TMDB ordering for a show, so can pick your naming from either of those sources. Nothing in your library will change unless you refresh the metadata (which we would encourage you to do, otherwise you’re missing out on the new features!)
In many cases I personally edited TVDB to improve and fix shows with sloppy or missing titles. Where would I even go to fix the stuff Plex is using now?
I looked on TMDB and I realize Plex is pulling this:
A lot wrong here, but first of all, TVDB has used the “Season XXXX” style naming for quite some time. All of my episodes are date-based with no season in their filenames. I have thousands of episodes.
My folders are organized like “Season 1991” “Season 1992” and so on.
This all worked fine until upgrading the agent; when I did, episodes starting 2021-09-13, now part of what TMDB is calling Season 38, are no longer getting any metadata in my “Season 2021”.
How is this supposed to work with date-based shows? I’d really rather stick with date for daily shows like this. Do the folders matter for season organization or not?
I’m just here to upvote this issue. Worse, the recent episodes are being tagged with dates, so they don’t match either style, which confuses Plex immensely, putting the most recent episodes at the start of the season display, as opposed to the end, and causing it to think when binging, that the most recent episode should then play directly into the first episode in January.
This is highly annoying, and no matter what I do, I can’t get the naming or sorting to act as I want it to. I’d be happier if it just used the names of the episodes, which are pulled from TVDB with date and names of the contestants.
I think those broken names/episode numbers are auto-generated from the filenames, then they get sorted wrong. I have the same issue.
One option is to make another library with the old agent and put all the shows that this “upgraded” agent broke into that, but it’s not a great solution.
I’m guessing this will affect any shows not well-maintained on TMDB, or maybe any shows that have divergent season naming on TMDB vs. TVDB. It’s honestly hard to tell what’s going wrong because there’s so little visibility into how the new agent makes decisions, at least from a UI standpoint.
It seems nearly impossible to get the attention of anyone at Plex for anything these days though. There’s currently a major regression in the new agents related to .plexignore, and is probably a single-line diff to a regex somewhere, but…
I recognize that they’re trying to work around the deplorable bait-and-switch profit motivation at TVDB and I support that, just was hoping that there’d be more attention paid to the inevitable bugs as this new agent is pushed out as rapidly as it has been.
I finally upgraded my matching yesterday, and now the Daily Show is dropping episodes in “Unknown Season”. In what conceivable way is this an “upgrade?” Everything matched before, and the new scanner is so obtuse in its UI, that I don’t even know where to begin trying to fix all of the matching it broke.
I had years of my MTV recordings in folders by year, dates in the file names, and had a good system going that showed in yearly seasons in the app. I switched to the new agent a couple months ago, and now they present to me randomly via of the dates in the filenames or metadata of the date it was captured that’s embedded in the file. Any files I’ve add after I switched to the new agent get filed to “[unknown season]” despite being organized the same as prior. A lot of custom info and tracklistings I added by hand got wiped. If I try to play this new weird Unknown Season on my TV, the app crashes on a Roku Stick. I’ve been messing with this for weeks now and am just kinda living with it at this point. I switched to the old agent and back again, and it posed more questions than answers.
Change the episode ordering drop down for the library to TheTVDB and perform a Plex Dance (I know that is going to suck with so many episodes), just refreshing metadata in my experience does little to make those changes actually take. Unfortunately you may lose the customizations you did while performing the Plex Dance, but you probably already lost those when you upgraded to the new agents. Hopefully that fixes it right up.
Edit: You could also try using something like FileBot to rename the files in bulk to TMDB standards but I’m not sure that would fix the bad metadata if it is on TMDB.
