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I have a few hundred episodes in ‘BBC Documentaries’ collected over many years. As such, I started naming these before the ‘Plex Series’ agent existed and I write the filenames to follow thetvdb conventions. Nevertheless once the Plex Series agent was released I dutifully switched to it to try and avoid issues in the future.
Sadly it seems I have now hit those issues regardless.
The first image shows the output from watch.plex.tv for the 2024 season. Note that the episodes stop at E87.
The second shows my library, notice that episodes higher than 87 are simply not named.
Should I therefore switch back to the (presumably soon to be deprecated) thetvdb agent, or will the Plex agent be updated with the episodes? As E87 was released on the 27th June I’m not expecting this to suddenly start working.
Did you switch your library to use the Episode Ordering named “TheTVDB (Aired)” by default?
If you primarily use TVDB, that is pretty much mandatory. Otherwise you will always be using TheMovieDB.org orderings, until you switch them for each series individually.
It’s in the properties of the library, on the Advanced tab.
Thanks for pointing out that other entry @SwiftPanda16 . Not sure why we have two but does seem like the one OP linked should be removed. adding to report.
This one should be fun. Given the reality that many of these were originally aired elsewhere (2024-2-7, PBS) as stand-alone documentaries (movies) to be later aired as a BBC documentary (2024-6-10), at least according to the TheTVDB.
Plex is going to need to implement a new “Shenanigans” order to deal with these types of discrepancies.
Personally I’d prefer the Plex agent to simply mirror thetvdb in all cases, if only because I feel the ‘database of TV’ should be the de facto source where any edits need to be made.
The Plex Series agent aggregates data from TMDB and TVDB. Picking an ordering in the series in Plex doesn’t change that. It only changes how the combined metadata is presented.
When the two primary sources disagree on such a fundament level (movie vs. series episode at the very least in this case) problems are bound to arise. Nobody but the sites’ moderators has any ability to referee this disagreement. So Plex is going to have to “pick a side.”
The consolidated metadata approach from plex is flawed as they never properly considered the full complexity of entries which differ massively between tmdb and tvdb.
There is an ever growing number of shows which are a complete mess due to this. Overtime it’s going to get even worse as they now are pulling tv series data also from imdb.
Oh, I don’t disagree. But each time one of these issues come up there seems to be a misunderstanding between the source of the data and its ordering. I think it would be great if there was a definitive Plex support article which could be referenced whenever this comes up. A sort of “Where We Get Our Data and How It’s Used” document. But it doesn’t exist, and there is confusion, and here we are.
So, default “episode ordering != (necessarily) episode metadata” statement. Augmented with opinions.
Agreed, however I suspect with their current implementation they don’t know without checking the sources so having an article would be next to impossible.
From my understanding, their code ranks each piece of metadata and based off the ranking that is what’s used. So, could be imdb, tmdb, tvdb, some other source or a combination of each. It’s a mess for us metadata enthusiasts.
I just hope the stuff they talked about at the fireside helps but the devil will be in the detail.
I do think, however, that Plex could document more clearly exactly how they consume the data. Which are primary sources, what data augments that, etc… Then folks could more accurately manipulate data on the primary sources’ sites. And, in cases where there is no ‘easy’ fix, lobby the sites to change their representation (unlikely given their recalcitrance to deviate at all from their “Bible.”
I know that, logically, Plex is not the arbiter of these types of decisions. But by choosing to be an aggregator of the available data, they have placed themselves in a position where they need to act as such (at least for their users) to resolve discrepancies. There needs to be clear documentation on how to resolve issues which may arise resulting from differences in these disparate data sources.
100%. Plex has said previously stated they do not want to own or maintain metadata. However, as you say their current implementation kinda now means they are. Us plex admins and community contributors on source sites have little to no control over it anymore within plex.
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