I recently added some Episodes to a lesser-known show from Swiss TV on TheTVDB: Helveticus - TheTVDB.com
However using the New Plex TV Scanner wich is my Standard I had no success in updating Metadata for that show. I tried everything. Removing, emptying trash, adding back, also refreshing all ShowsMetadata - nothing worked. When I switched the scanner to Plex Series Scanner with Agent TheTVDB it worked instantly. So I can only guess that there is some background process on Plex side to fetch metadata from TheTVDB to Plex’ own scanner that takes quite some time.
Does anyone know what the expected refresh times are? I made these Changes on theTVDB two days ago on May 11. I would like to use the newer scanner but not getting recent metadata is a no-no for me.
Well as I said, roughly 48 hours. Ok, this might be the issue then, will try again tonight. Is there any way to speed up this for the future / force it manually? Where do you have this knowledge of 72h from? Couldnt find this info.
That is odd. Because I THINK other changes I made to another show were Instant as well but I wasnt sure anymore so I didnt mention it. Then why is this behavior not consistent?
Ive been lurking on the forums for a while, and after the move to the new Plex Agent they have said several times that they combine data from TMDB and TVDB into the “Plex Database” that is used. They have said that changes are imported several times a week. They have not given an exact time window, but rather that time window is from past discussions, sometimes its faster than that, sometimes its a bit longer. but in general ~72 wait is normally good enough for the changes to show up.
The new plex agent is a consolidation of metadata from, TMDB, TVDB and to a lesser extent IMDB. In their back-end they run logic which decided which in their opinion is best to store but they have never shared what this is.
You can control the episode ordering via the advanced settings depending on how your media is named on disk either TMDB or TVDB but that is just ordering, the metadata is a consolidation. There maybe some exceptions to this but not many.
IMO: I’ve typically found TMDB to be best for shows and plex most of the time picks them up when I make metadata changes but not always.
BTW… it typically takes between 24-48 hours for changes to creep there way from TMDB/TVDB into plex but I have seen it take up to and over a week depending what else plex are running in their own back-end.
TMDB is just as good if not better these days when compared to TVDB when it comes strictly to metadata and its content. You just need to name your media correctly to match their strict naming scheme.
I ditched TVDB approx 2 years ago for all TV metadata and would now never look back. Their overviews in general are not summaries of entire episodes which was one of the reasons I moved.
A small number of shows I do use TVDB episode ordering (Firefly as an example) but its less than 5 from over 700 TV shows in my collection.
As I say, you can’t use a different scraper with the new plex agent. The plex metadata is a consolidation from multiple sources and their logic in the back-end decides what is best from each of the online sources.
All you can control is the episode ordering based on how you have named your media on disk. Its in the advanced settings of your library or the show level. See screenshot below…
Oh sorry I misread episode ordering. Yes, I was aware of that. Ok thank you. Will look into tmdb then. Gotta say it is VERY intransparent from Plex’ side how to deal with this topic and I’m glad you know this. Will test it this evening and mark it as solved if successful.
So I reverted back to the new Scraper. So far so bad.
Today it must have been roughly 72h since I created entries on TheTVDB. No changes at all, it still gets the old, incomplete metadata. Alright then I thought and also created the Show from scratch on TMDB. Still: no Updates in Plex. This is kind of annoying to say the least.
Most frustrating: I have no Idea where The incomplete Metadata comes from. It SHOULD be TheTVDB, since only those episodes that were created there before I added the others are shown. I guess I will have to wait for longer. But does anyone know this: Now that I have created entries in TheTVDB and TMDB: will Plex prefer TMDB over TheTVDB? I also created entries on TMDB for another show that is not on TheTVDB but on IMDB: Will Plex prefer TMDB over IMDB (especially because my preferred Language is only added on TMDB)?
Is there any way to see the metadata source of a given entry?
Take a deep breath, get a cup of coffee and come back tomorrow. The lag time for stuff from source to plex is ~72 hours but that’s not exact. Give it an extra day.
The wait will be ~72 hours since you edited the show on TMDB (today). It should show up on https://watch.plex.tv, so you can keep checking there to see when Plex has imported the show into it’s database.
Mostly it seems ok, but there are some shows on TMDB that differ quite a bit from Gracenote.
I started recording Modern Marvels and the EPG guide data on upcoming shows will say one thing. It matches the Tivo EPG data on upcoming showings. The shows are recorded and saved with the title matching the EPG data. When I play the show, it matches what is in the EPG. Unfortunately, when you look at the episode data from the web interface, its completely wrong. Looking at TMDB, I see it has the same wrong info.
