I am finding that Plex is getting really bad at matching in TVDB, unless you a dance with punctuation and noise words like ‘a’, ‘the’ etc.
So for example it couldn’t match the BBC TV Series “African Renaissance When Art Meets Power” or even just “African Renaissance”, but finally “African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power” (note the colon) gets a match. It’s strange because there are other cases where Plex returns titles with not even a word in common with the search.
Back in a previous life when I worked a lot with text search and indexes, we would generally throw away punctuation and noise words in order to get a match. It seems Plex has been going in the other direction, and I fear that precise capitalisation is going to be mandatory in future.
Server Version#: 1.19.5.3112
Player Version#: 1.16.0.1364-da192ff7
In general, when I’m adding files, almost always reference / search the title in the corresponding database, or just a regular google search, then copy and page the name for the file. It takes more time to rip stuff like that but you end up with a nicely named file system. If your pulling from a torrent or something, it’s up to you to make sure that naming convention is decent.
I find the “noise words” annoying too, but maybe you can make a feature request.
My file names and search text are already clean, and I’m copy pasting from IMDB and other sources. There is often a problem as to what the databases consider the canonical title, but not dealing with colons is taking it a bit far.
This problem was not as common a few months ago, when it easily matched “XXXXX, The” with “The XXXXX”, but those days have gone. Has there been an algorithm or API change?
Hit the problem again with the Neil deGrasse Tyson series “The Inexplicable Universe”. Inexplicably this name is insufficient to get any matches. So I tried “The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries” which is the IMDB title. That didn’t work until this time, I removed the magic colon after Universe to match TVDB.
So this seems to be an arbitrary feature of how volunteers have uploaded TV series subtitles in various databases. Again, putting on my search query API writer hat on, why is a single item of punctuation being enforced in a time when hardly anyone can punctuate correctly?
