Previously had Transformers Combiner Wars series on Plex and now they are releasing Transfomers Titan Return. The two series have been combined into a single entry called Transformers Prime Wars Trilogy on thetvdb.com. I changed over to that name and scanned with Plex and it couldn’t find it. I thought maybe it was just added/changed and so hadn’t propagated yet to Plex’s cache of thetvdb (does it still do that or directly query thetvdb now?), so I gave it a day or two. That was a week ago and it still can’t find the series trying to match manually or Plex dancing it.
Any idea what is going on? Any way to force a match using tvdb ID# or URL?
Since this will probably be asked, folder name is “Transformers - Prime Wars Trilogy [2016]” and files are named like “Transformers - Prime Wars Trilogy - 2x01 - Aftermath and Rebirth.mkv”.
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don’t replace illegal characters with other characters. Simply leave them out.
(i.e. don’t replace the : with -)
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the release year goes into parentheses ( ), not brackets
(stuff in brackets [ ] is ignored by Plex)
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your season/episode code is in Kodi-format. Plex uses s02e01
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do you have ‘Season’ folders?
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Since your files are already matched to a different show (technically), you must perform the Plex Dance
see https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200220687-Naming-Series-Season-Based-TV-Shows
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Since : is an illegal character in file names, I like to put in the - instead to keep the names looking right. I do this on literally hundreds of shows/movies and it doesn’t cause a problem. I even believe Plex just drops punctuation anyway so it is not even a character that Plex passes when searching.
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I actually put it in brackets [ ] purposefully because it isn’t part of the names of the show and there is no need to differentiate by using year. It is just there for me to keep track of chronology of Transformer series since there are so many all with different names. Again, I use that on dozens of folders and has not caused an issue before. It shouldn’t affect matching because that is a unique name and 2016 is actually the year listed in thetvdb, so if anything it should help.
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Again again, I literally use the 1x01 episode numbering format on thousands of files and it has never caused an issue in the past. I don’t see why it would magically stop working now. It would seem odd for Plex to suddenly puke on naming when I have been using the same thing for years and with thousands upon thousands of files.
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Yes I do have season folders.
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As I said before, I did do a Plex Dance on them - moved them out of the directory, scanned, emptied trash, moved them back in and rescanned. Same issue.
Just for argument’s sake, I did all you asked. I removed the hyphen and the year and switched the episode numbering to s01e01 format. Example path and file, though this was done to all files in the series:
Transformers Prime Wars Trilogy\Season 1\Transformers Prime Wars Trilogy - s01e01 - The Fall.mp4
I did the Plex Dance (moved out of folder, scan, empty trash, clean bundles, renamed as above, then moved back into folder & rescanned) and same result.
To reiterate, when I try to do a manual match, “Transformers: Prime Wars Trilogy” doesn’t even come up as an option. It is like it can’t find it out there on thetvdb.com website.
Plex uses heuristic algorithms during matching. It is all about ‘probabilities’.
All those things 1) - 4) are usually without consequences, unless you hit a border case where Plex cannot establish a high-enough probability where to match a certain file/show.
You can continue to do it your way, but you may hit these cases in the future at some time. Usually this gets more likely as your collection grows.
I see you are using mp4 files.
Is the ‘Local Media Assets’ agent demoted to the lowest position in your agent configuration(s)?
If not, embedded metadata in your files could
- interfere with the matching process
- override metadata from the online metadata sources
There may still be some caching issue going on.
Try emptying your server’s local metadata cache:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/202967376-Clearing-Plugin-Channel-Agent-HTTP-Caches
I didn’t want to get into a “fight” about naming, so I switched them over to standard naming. I’ll leave them as such until this is figured out to remove that as a variable/focus.
MP4 is only for the first season. Second season they are MKVs. I verified in agent settings that TheTVDB is the top metadata source and local assests are below. Looking in the file properties > details for the files that are MP4 and there is no metadata set inside the files themselves.
Tried clearing the cache and did Plex Dance again.
root@yggdrasil:/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches# ll | grep -i thetvdb
drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 22 Sep 11 2016 com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb/
root@yggdrasil:/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches# du -sh com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb/
9.4M com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb/
root@yggdrasil:/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches# mv com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb.old
root@yggdrasil:/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches# ll | grep -i thetvdb
drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 22 Sep 11 2016 com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb.old/
root@yggdrasil:/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches# ### did plex dance
root@yggdrasil:/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches# ll | grep -i thetvdb
drwxr-xr-x 1 nobody users 22 Dec 18 16:33 com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb/
drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 22 Sep 11 2016 com.plexapp.agents.thetvdb.old/
root@yggdrasil:/mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Caches#
Same result (no matching).
I cannot completely rule out an issue with the Plex proxy which buffers the TVDB data.
I have created a fake show.
I got no match as well.
I will take this to the developers.
So it appears the API on TheTVDB doesn’t get a match when we ask for “Transformers: Prime Wars Trilogy”
It does however deliver a result when we ask for “Transformers Combiner Wars”, which is still listed as an alternate name for this series.
Sigh.
Apparently there is a difference between what is delivered when we use the API to query TheTVDB (the ‘proper’ way for an app like Plex) and what the main website is showing.
So it turns out that the search in TheTVDB doesn’t do fuzzy logic.
If you perform a manual ‘Match’ procedure
and put the colon into the search string, you’ll get an instant match and meta data.
Thanks! Can confirm (even with going back to my original naming), once I added in the “:” in the manual search it was able to find/match to the right series, still with only 94% confidence but at least it let me select it. Very odd bug. Is this something that can be fixed by Plex or is the API just broken for TheTVDB and nothing we can do?
@deusxanime said:
Is this something that can be fixed by Plex or is the API just broken for TheTVDB and nothing we can do?
Sorry, I can’t tell you. I will bring this up again with the developers.
